EDITORIAL - In whose hands will the blood be?

If it is true, as claimed by a family friend quoted in news reports, that Jolo Revilla shot himself out of despondency over the fate that has befallen his father, senator Bong Revilla, who is now in detention over plunder charges, it will be the second time that self-inflicted violence has marred what are supposed to be moral campaigns against corruption. The first involved former armed forces chief Angelo Reyes, who took his own life while still being investigated.

Self-inflicted violence is not in the culture of Filipinos, even if Filipinos themselves are quick to point out extreme measures taken by troubled officials in other countries as the honorable way out of a predicament. Maybe this has to do with our Catholic upbringing. Or maybe we are simply a people who would prefer to tough it out than go out the back door.

As if to underscore this country's abhorrence of the phenomenon, the cases of Reyes and Jolo tend to bring out the human dimensions of their actions, while at the same time despising the inhuman lengths to which corruption is to be pursued as if there is really a clear divide defining who is corrupt and who is not. Where there is no such defining line that separates the black from what is not white, human lives become too costly a price to pay for moral uncertainty.

Without touching on the merits of both cases, it is very clear that the supposed drive for moral transformation and reform has not scooted off in one direction. There is in the two cases a clear attempt to prosecute beyond what the evidence suggests. When ill motives become more apparent than the evidence itself, a pain far greater than any guilt or accountability can inflict is experienced.

It is this pain that can often reduce a person to the point where meaning loses its capacity for tenacity and the will to cling to hope. It is this pain that forces a revisit of the cases involved and summons up the question of whether anything at all in the list of human follies is anything ever worth the sacredness and value of a human life.

It is so easy to whip up a fiesta over allegations of corruption. In fact, the din can even be more rapacious when roared by the hordes that are far guiltier than the accused. Nothing is more adept at disguising the truth than hypocrisy. And that is why to be accused of wrongdoing in this country can be a dying thing when you know evil triumphs when really good men do nothing.

It is such a waste of human life, even of the corrupt, when the manner in which determinations are made cannot stand even the slightest scrutiny or resist the slightest probing for bias and ill will. No good can ever come out of evil even if it is skillfully disguised as good. It drains the soul to keep cheering in the sidelines in the name of moral uprightness and good governance when you see people driven off the edge because they never were given a fair chance.