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[av_heading heading=’VIEWPOINTS | Life is cheap’ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote’ size=” subheading_active=’subheading_below’ subheading_size=’15’ padding=’10’ color=” custom_font=”]
BY OSCAR CRUZ
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Saturday, May 6, 2017
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IT CAN BE loudly and emphatically disregarded and denied. It can even be attributed to those who are downright ignorant of ground realities and their but elementary consequences. Or it can even be simply considered as a matter of fact that death necessarily follows life. In other words, what’s new?
There are those who see nothing, think nothing and say nothing about the blatant reality that life is downright cheap in these days and times in our country. So it is that in the course of time, killings, murders, massacres happen as a matter of course, looked upon as something natural, logical, and sound even.
This is not about life already taken away before birth through abortion of different kinds and means. This is not even about the living taking away their own lives through suicide or anything the like. This is about human lives – men, women, youngsters – nonchalantly done away with by any means, through many ways. And this monstrosity takes place night and day, here and there, this or that way, 24/7.
More. The killings take place at home and in the streets, practically anywhere such that cadavers are found sprawled here, lying there. So it is that if no one at all is killed the whole day through – this is really news, some kind of a miracle.
It would be downright falsity if not insanity to allege that such a morbid state of lives in the Philippines is but imaginary – or simply designed to downgrade anyone, to lambast certain individuals or group thereof.
The deadly phenomenon is actual – and actual too are the following realities: There are more and more weaponries on the ground, in the skies and in the seas. There is a fast-growing spirit of killing among more and more murderous groups particularly in certain regions in the country – groups bearing different titles but having the one and the same over-all intent to kill.
This is not to mention such phenomena as the long on-going deadly national episode on account of prohibited drug manufacturers and distributors, sellers, purchasers and users – a phenomenon that has now even reached the knowledge and awareness of relevant international organizations.
More and more strict security measures are seriously planned and adopted for more and more local and international occasions in more and more places in different parts of the country. And so it is that the so-called “travel advisory” is issued by more and more foreign countries warning their respective citizens when and if they dare go to the Philippines even but for reason of a short visit, a good time, and the like.
Simple and plain translation of the advisory: Do not go to the Philippines. Your life will be in danger. Go somewhere else.
During these times, it is the height of incongruity if not downright duplicity every time the Filipinos shout “Mabuhay!” in greeting foreign visitors when these are in fact in danger of death for one reason or another, in this or that place in the country.
Life has become cheap in the Philippines when the word repeatedly said and heard is “kill”, when death happens here and there as a matter of course. Would that this sad and sorry, daily and ordinary fact of killing – death day and night – spare the generation of youngsters today from imbibing the gross falsehood that life is cheap.
What a gross inheritance they would get!/PN
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