These are times that the Filipino spirit characterized with joy and laughter, with fun and hope is put to test. The spirit of Christmas reigns almost half the year. Fiestas of all kinds for one reason or another are celebrated all over the land. Occasions are invented to enjoy life, to celebrate, eat and laugh. While all such positive social events and joyful features then accompanied the Filipinos year after year after year, there are now more and more sad and saddening realities that come to fore, that try men’s soul, that dampen if not seriously challenge the Filipino psyche.
Would that media not be silenced in the face of disturbing realities that are becoming neutralized in their negative significance and disturbing impact and eventually considered as but normal in the Philippine landscape.
Extra-judicial killings, summary executions, downright murders 24/7 are fast becoming routinary. Dead men, women and children found here and there. Guns of all makes and sizes are used to terminate human lives as a matter of existence as but a customary agenda. Corpses found in houses, in the streets, in the fields, under the ground. Cadavers crowding the morgues with no claimers, no takers. Human life as the greatest gift to man done away without remorse day in and day out. The time of counting the population has been overtaken by the counting of the dead.
Small prisons housing extra-big number of prisoners. People still presumed innocent yet still presumed innocent are already punished to the hilt. Not only is there no place to sleep but there is also practically none to comfortably sit down, or reasonably stand on–much less any space to get enough sleep. Imprisoned young or old yet remain incarcerated while still not proven guilty. Sickness of all kinds with different gravity and pain they have as a matter of course. The prisoners are dirty and wear dirty clothes.
It was bad enough in the not too distant past but it may be worse in these times. Few are the courts but fewer still are the judges. Quasi-innumerable are the cases waiting resolution. The court files are not only enormous in volume but are also gathering good amounts of dust. There are lawyers who are masters in the matter of the postponement of hearings for this and that reason. Meanwhile, the hands of the judges are tied by normative procedural law. And so it is that justice denied is not simply justice denied but simply injustice per se.
(from CBCP News)