Farcical re-runs cannot be tragic

Again there is much wailing on the wall and more fury in the streets. Again people look up to the skies, shake their fists and scream their guts out for justice. In the morgues are the stilled souls who hours earlier had prayed, sang hosannas to their Lord and then returning to their hotel rooms, slept, unaware that death lurked in their temporary manor, waiting to end their life by snuffing out the very air that their providential Creator had endowed the planet.

The ritual continues. The nation’s top officials rush to the scene and commisserate with the families of the victims, promising the latter immediate medical and other assistance to help them with their current difficulties and – in many other touching ways – acting to lighten their crushing sense of grief. Formal investigations are promised, the service of justice is pledged and soon enough the officials must leave to attend to their other functions.

The rites go on, as before. Preparations are made to lay the dead to rest and the living are piously reminded of the inscrutable mysteries of the Lord and how there must be such a thing as amazing grace. The solemn services are conducted, the tearful songs are sung, the uplifting elegies are served and the nostalgic responses, as before, are made.

In the space between, TV gets to show its morbidly graphic video clips and plays its customary sound bytes – at times the unnerving wails of victims and their families, yet other times their furious screams for retribution, then the sonorous pronouncements by solemn-faced authorities that indeed, this time, justice would not be thwarted and, finally, the engaging commentaries and the heated discussions by TV hosts and their highly articulate guests. (While radio and the newspapers may be less graphic than TV in their coverage of a human tragedy, they essentially hew to the same presentation format as the latter. Actually, there may be only one – and perhaps a rather minor – difference between them. Those in radio or in print media appear to be more comfortable in projecting a sense of infallibility, regardless of whether they are merely clarifying a public issue or aggressively advancing a policy to manage it.)

When citizens are murdered by those who would unscrupulously ignore the law, in connivance with public officials who equally unscrupulously would permit the law to be ignored, much in the act might pass for a national tragedy. This terrible happening – comprising no more than a single act – could properly be the subject of those who specialize in scripting tragedies.

Extended to two or more acts, such a murderous happening should no longer be viewed as a tragic play. With flagrant, recurring instances of fires fueled by some businessmen’s mercenary greed and ignited by the authorities’ criminal neglect, it would be foolish to speak of a series of tragedies overtaking the nation. In the Ozone Disco Club, the Manor Hotel, and the numerous other murderous fires in Quezon City alone in the last two decades, one must no longer insist on maintaining a liberal’s tragic perspective.

What one needs is a sharper sense of outrage, a public sense which demands a full accounting by all those who had anything to do with approving the construction and the operation of these buildings – the crematoria of both the innocent and the unfortunate. Not only the most senior officials, but also those who immediately assist them must be charged with murder "most foul" and no less than the penalties of a heinous crime must be meted them.

The greedy businessmen and their compliant allies in government deserve no less. Without a determined application of justice – preferably as summary as the law would permit – these murderers will continue to twit their noses at the law and the public the laws are sworn to protect. Unpunished, these heinous criminals will force the citizenry to suffer farcical reruns which the latter – unwilling to confront its ugly realities – will then irresponsibly romanticize as tragedies.