Everybody wants a shortcut. If we can find
a way to make any process in our lives shorter or easier, we would do it.
Just take a look at what’s happening in our
country today. Yes, we recognize that we indeed have a lot of deep-seated
problems, but let’s focus on the most recent one: The Drug Menace.
Granted, we didn’t know the extent of the
problem until six months ago. It is true that most drug cases get thrown out of
court because let’s face it, drug dealing is a very lucrative business, and in
our country, those who have the most money gets the most “justice” in our
oxymoronic justice system.
So again, we resort to shortcuts. Instead
of fixing the real problem, the criminal justice system, we elect a guy who
bypasses the rule of law in favor of killing anybody that is ‘suspected’ (we
say this because we believe that everybody is innocent until proven otherwise,
which most of them are) of being involved in the drug trade.
Now we laud the efforts of President
Punisher, but have we ever asked, what’s the basis of those killings? How did
they get their ‘hit list’ together? Did they research on it? Did they get it
from the TokHang campaign? And are all of them really in the drug business, or
just happened to be too vocal a critic to this (*cough* De Lima *cough*)?
The indignant activists shout that
“Everyone could be a drug pusher”, that some people may find the drug war an
opportunity to kill opponents without the risk of being caught or punished, as
long as they keep up with the premise that everyone killed is ‘a tentacle of
the drug octopus smothering our society’.
To top it all, there is little, if any,
public outcry over this! We rationalize, saying “at least something is being
done about this” and “at least it’s mostly drug addicts and pushers.”
I teach history. And if there’s one thing
that history teaches us, it’s that when a government acts without any checks
and balances, when a single powerful entity acts without accountability to
others, that’s when the problems arise.
For me the best historical parallel of this
would be Maximillian Robespierre, the infamous head of the Committee on Public
Safety during the French Revolution. He was an honest man, and believed that he
had truth on his side. The committee’s name is a bitter euphemism whose real
goal was to secure the ‘safety’ of the Revolution by rounding up and beheading
by guillotine those who are or might be a threat to the newly founded Republique Francais. In the end, almost
40,000 people died throughout France through the blade of the guillotine or any
other means. Ironically, the last to be beheaded would be Robespierre himself,
a victim of the very device with which he judged the people. This horrible time
in history is referred to as the Reign of Terror.
Robespierre believed that he had the mandate
to act in the interest of the State, that he had to do whatever it takes to
impose order and peace among his beloved country. He was a patriot, a zealous
one at that, but his zeal took things too far. Too many people executed on
little to no evidence, too many intellectuals and artists and merchants left
France, bringing the country’s already ailing economy in ruins. The Reign of
Terror ended and stability only came to France when Napoleon took over and
re-imposed the rule of law, which he ironically went against when he tried to
take all of Europe, but that’s another story.
The highly inefficient and dubious justice
system that we have had eroded the public’s trust on lawyers and judges. In a
society where almost every official takes bribes that it became a subculture
entirely, it’s no wonder why the people elected a wrecking ball of sorts to
demolish the structure that’s supposed to shelter society from the winds and
rains of injustice. What the structure really needed was a cleaning up, a
reorganization of the stuff and the people in it. We have one of the best –written
constitutions in the world, but it’s in the implementation that we fell short
on.
It is a lot easier to blow up bridges than
to make trains run on time, but wrecked bridges won’t help anyone. If we blow
up the rule of law, it might be good in the short run but ultimately will be
the ruin of all of us.
