Against violence

Editorial, The Evening Paper
Issue of 13 September 1995

Whatever time one goes home every day after work, it would be almost impossible to ignore the ubiquitous radio and its hourly, or half-hourly, newscast. The daily newspaper expands the reader's national vista, but the radio fills him with the excitement, the immediacy, the urgency of events as they happen from day to day.

But it is not radio's fault that those events, viewed from the perspective of months, even years, fill us with gut-wrenching visions of increasingly horrendous acts of violence. There was a time when all the excitement from radio newscasts was occasioned by typhoons, fires, and political rallies. Was it after martial rule that the air lanes came to know of a different kind of hair-raising excitement, this time from discoveries of dismembered or buried bodies, rapes and massacres and kidnappings, victims bloodied by lawmen's bullets or poleaxed by drug addicts, youngsters black and blue from maltreatment or dead from hazing?

Even the modus operandi for successful bank robberies now make it de rigueur to include a few wasted lives, whether they be those of security guards or innocent civilians.

And no doubt, when we define violence, we limit it to the purely physical. Who even cares about the ugly scars wrought on soul and spirit by daily emotional and verbal violence--from employers, neighbors, classmates, by parents on children and children on parents, by siblings just as well as strangers?

When and how did we learn to become so violent, both in action and in language? Whence came this thirst for inflicting pain, this joy in seeing others suffer, this need to watch someone bleed and hear him wail from wounds we have inflicted?

Psychologists and psychiatrists, social scientists and clinical theorists, priests and evangelists, academicians and politicians--every one is certain to have a ready answer or, at least, an acceptable theory. Perhaps years of repression against a moment of blinding liberation. Or the systematic and programmed destruction of a people's moral underpinnings by a dictator. The message of a totally materialistic culture delivered by all forms of media in graphic pictures and attractive colors. Changing times, changed people. A sign of the times?

The answers are probably all these, and more. But providing answers does not assure solutions, and sounding off does not produce results.

What is important is to awaken people to the power of action and to nag public officials about the responsibility of authority. The Crusade Against Violence had a good grip on the problem when they advocated action at all levels of government and society. Watchfulness and concerted action, beginning with community and homeowners' associations and barangays and reaching all the way to the President, will do more to prevent violence than all the law enforcers' guns put together.

But action alone will not be enough. Moral values will again have to be installed and internalized. Church and school organizations must reenergize and immediately start intensive programs in values formation and Christian living. Families must be at the forefront of a campaign to effect a turnaround in social and moral philosophy. If need be, parents must once again be willing martyrs at the altar of moral regeneration. Only then can they hope that their own children will be saved.

-- NBT