Pinoys, Shortcuts and Due Process

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.