[OPINION] Kim Chiu and our ever-unfolding tragedy

On 3 March 2020, masked men sprayed bullets on the van carrying Kim Chiu to work. We all know what happened: she was lying down trying to get more sleep at the precise moment the bullets came flying. She survived, thank God, and we all heaved a collective sigh of relief. She gave interviews later that day while still visibly shaken. She thanked God and asked “Why me? I’m not a bad person. I have no enemies.” The DOJ announced an investigation. We could all sleep soundly. All’s well that ends well. 

But what if it hadn’t? What if Kim Chiu died that day?

There’d be huffing and puffing, for sure. Finger pointing, of course. Why, if so and so only did their job, Kim Chiu would still be alive today. There’d be soul searching and chest beating on the internet. Trolls will blame Kim Chiu herself, exactly like if she had survived. Not wanting to be outdone, Senator Pabida would call for a Senate investigation. The DOJ would tell the NBI to find and arrest the perpetrators; the PNP would conduct all sorts of forensic examinations. All for the all-too-predictable finale of the usual suspects being rounded up, charged, and convicted in record time. 

But none of it will mean anything. Kim Chiu will still be dead. Xian Lim is left grieving, broken, and inconsolable. 

“Why?” Xian would ask. “Why her? She was a good person. She had no enemies.” 

It’s a fair question to ask, the natural query of a logical mind. The thousands upon thousands of families of tokhang victims asked it too. 

But it’s not the one we should be asking. 

The ever-unfolding tragedy around us

Think of your usual day. You wake up. Go to work. Come home. Overeat a little. Shoot the shit with your friends. Go to bed a little later than necessary, and sleep a little longer than is acceptable. (Now, because of COVID-19, there’s no more traveling or no more work. Take your pick.) 

Your life is clockwork. 

The news on the daily, while unfortunate, doesn’t affect you. Why should it, when you’ve got bills to pay? You have family to support. Why, you’re on the cusp of making a breakthrough at work! A little more and, surely, you’ll be promoted. You’ll finally be able to afford that car you’ve been eyeing. Maybe even go on that dream vacation (COVID disagrees). 

Aside from the occasional “online protest” in the form of a witty 140-character indignant post supporting the latest trending hashtag, you just don’t have enough space in your life to do anything about every single death, illegal arrest, or any of those random public outcries of the day. Work and family come first. 

Sure, it’s unfortunate. But it’s not your problem. You’re a good person. You have no enemies. Stuff like that doesn’t happen to good, law-abiding citizens like yourself. 

Except it does. It happened to Kim Chiu. And it continues to happen every day, even when it isn’t being picked up by any of the news outlets.  

There is an ever-unfolding tragedy around us, yet we are all somehow too busy living our little lives. For some reason, we have all forgotten our place in the bigger picture, in the interconnected mesh we call society. Not only that, but we value too little our role, however miniscule, in the long arc of our shared history. 

Tragedy of the commons

The “tragedy of the commons” is the name economists gave to the scenario where individuals, all acting on the logic of self-interest, actually come out worse than if they had helped each other. Examples abound: overfishing, climate change, and unmitigated traffic are just 3 examples. 

It’s the “me, me, me” mentality, but everyone’s guilty. 

What happened to Kim Chiu, what happened to Kian, hell, what happened to ABS-CBN, De Lima, Sereno, Maria Ressa, and everything else since 2016 – each of these is just one facet of our ever-unfolding tragedy. And it’s one we’ve ignored for far too long. 

As tragedies usually go, none of it makes sense. Good people are murdered. Bad people are let go. The evil remain unpunished. The just are rewarded – with bullets and imprisonment. It’s the setting of a dystopia only George Orwell could imagine. 

And as societal problems usually go, its sheer size and complexity is just too much for one little ole’ you. Sure, you’re a good person, but you’re just one person. What can one person possibly do to change anything in this godforsaken hellhole? 

Think of the Other

The “tragedy of the commons” requires not an objective solution with discrete, measurable steps; it requires a change of attitude, a recalibration of perspective. 

Let’s use traffic as an example. 

Suppose Juan, Pedro, and Marco all have cars. With no traffic, each of them is an hour’s drive away from their respective offices. Yet in the morning, as they rush to work, they all somehow manage to greet one another in an alleyway that can only accommodate one car at a time. Minutes of bickering and one-upping turn into hours, and they somehow achieve what none of them want: their commute took 3 hours instead of one. 

None of it would have been a problem had they just talked. What if they had previously agreed that Marco will leave at 7, Pedro at 7:15, and Juan at 7:30? What if they just carpooled? They would all save not just time but gas! 

By putting themselves into each other’s shoes, they all come out winners. 

The Bill of Rights is our way out

The Bill of Rights is a simple, no-nonsense list of don’ts. Don’t kill me, don’t arrest me, don’t take away my property. Don’t shut me up. Don’t tell me which god to believe in and which person to marry. 

All of it is addressed to the government. The reason, as I mentioned previously, is borne of collective experience and history. The Bill of Rights is Juan, Pedro, and Marco agreeing. 

But none of it matters when all we can muster whenever one of us is murdered is a defeated shrug. It loses its force and persuasiveness whenever we turn our heads and go about our days business-as-usual, even while the government manages to outdo itself by coming up with an atrocity more depraved than the last one. And so it goes, through our complicit submissiveness, yesterday’s inhumanity becomes today’s norm. 

Hannah Arendt, in her magnus opus titled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, recorded the horrors of Nazi Germany and how its evil passed into normalcy. In it, she included this chilling passage from David Rousset, a former inmate of Buchenwald who described his experience in a concentration camp: 

“The triumph of the S.S. demands that the tortured victim allow himself to be led to the noose without protesting, that he renounce and abandon himself to the point of ceasing to affirm his identity. And it is not for nothing. It is not gratuitously, out of sheer sadism, that the S.S. men desire his defeat. They know that the system which succeeds in destroying its victim before he mounts the scaffold…is incomparably the best for keeping a whole people in slavery. In submission. Nothing is more terrible than these processions of human beings going like dummies to their deaths.”

Are we all being led to the noose without protesting? 

Kim Chiu must live

Kim Chiu is a good person, I’m sure. But so was Kian. So was Djastin. Kim Chiu doesn’t deserve to die. 

No one does. 

But it’s not enough in these extraordinary times to merely say these things or to post about them on our walls while we hide behind sufficiently anonymized nom de guerres. Online exhibitions of our unfathomable wit cannot shield anyone from the bullets of masked men. 

The only way out of this ever-unfolding tragedy is for each of us to think of the other and to act accordingly. It requires all of us to come out and show the government that We, The People are the real sovereign. One may call it empathy. Others may call it courage. Gandhi called it passive resistance. John Lewis, the Civil Rights hero who recently passed away, called it “good trouble, necessary trouble.” 

In Duterte’s time, I can only call it survival. – Rappler.com

Michael de Castro is a lawyer who practices human rights in the trenches. He is the founder of Leflegis, a network of lawyers dedicated to the cultivation of democratic principles within and without the confines of legal practice.