No innocent bystanders
I have this queasy uneasy feeling that Filipinos have not come to fully appreciate the gravity and the danger of the illegal drug problem. My suspicion is that the great interest with which they follow the congressional hearings on drugs and related concerns has more to do with the drama these hearings provide than any real desire to seriously know more about the problem.
This is not totally unexpected, of course. And I do not know exactly how to explain it, but it seems to me that Filipinos have a real and enduring affinity for rumor and intrigue. They seem predisposed to embrace hearsay first and check it against the facts later instead of the other way around. The congressional hearings do precisely just that.
All of us seem to already know the story about everything that is currently going on in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. More importantly, we all have already formed our own conclusions. Our interest in the hearings is merely to validate what we have already long heard of or made assumptions about. Come on, you cannot deny having already heard about this or that personality summoned to the hearings. You just want the sordid details.
Not that congressional hearings do not serve a purpose. They do. But the legislation the hearings are supposed to be in aid of are either too slow in coming or are not coming at all. And when they do come, more often than not they fall far short of expectations and prove far less interesting than the hearings that gave birth to them.
Despite their uses, though, there is a danger that these hearings can distract the people from the real dangers Filipinos truly face. The illegal drug problem is real. And it is far worse not only than what we imagined it to be but in what we are willing to believe. Despite testimony derived from these hearings about murder and mayhem, we have not budged from our original compulsion to watch them only for the distraction and entertainment they provide.
But that is precisely what makes the drug problem more dangerous than what we are willing to accept and acknowledge. We are getting distracted. We are allowing ourselves to get distracted. We have not realized that, away from the drama of the hearings, there is a real battle now going on in the streets. And it is not being merely reflected in the daily killings of drug suspects.
The real battle, really, is keeping the war on drugs from spinning out of control. Wars, because of their terrible cost, can never be allowed to spin out of control. That is why there are conventions that govern the conduct of belligerents in any conflict. When Filipinos by the millions voted President Duterte into office on the promise of waging war on drugs, little did they know what a terrible face war truly has.
But the war on drugs has a face uglier than can ever be described in a congressional hearing. It is even uglier than the killings that have already repulsed many. These people should know they haven't seen nothing yet. The thing is, the war against drugs is not a conventional type of war where, if the protagonists have had enough, they can always call it quits and sign a truce.
The war on drugs is a war of attrition. You cannot start it and drop out of it halfway. It is a war that, once you start it, you have to finish it. Like a cancer, you cannot leave some pretty messed up cells behind. The worst part of it, and which all of us need to accept whether we like it or not, is that the war on drugs is not Duterte's war alone. It is a war of an entire society. It is a war with no innocent bystanders.
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