Pencil power

I spent the whole of last weekend in bed with the flu, with ANC, CNN, BBC and Bloomberg (plus some murder mystery shows) to keep me company. About the only bit of good news out of those endless hours of television was that the price of oil had fallen to a five-and-a-half-year low, and sure enough, at the start of the week there was an oil price rollback of P1.70 per liter for gasoline.

ANC kept me abreast of the tortuously slow pace of the barefoot Nazarene procession – four hours into the procession and the image was hardly even a kilometer from where it started! – a situation I would have had to contend with getting to work if I hadn’t been knocked down by this bug. The reports on CNN and BBC would’ve been enough to knock anyone down, with the unfolding drama of terror that started late Wednesday (our time) with the attack on the editorial office of Charlie Hebdo right in the heart of Paris.

One of the reporters covering the standoff at Dammartin-en-Goele where the terrorist brothers who attacked Charlie Hebdo had holed up in a printing company made a comment that this was not just news, this was personal, it having been an attack on colleagues in the industry, murdered directly in relation to their work. There may arise a discussion on whether the cartoonists went too far, poking fun at a religious figure revered by many. Did Carlie Hebdo offend? For sure, and in the course of their many years in print they’ve offended a whole lot of other people, groups, religions, races, professions... But that’s the nature of satire and cartooning. Getting pikon is not a valid response, and a hail of automatic gunfire (or a firebomb, as was thrown at the Hamburg paper) can never ever figure in any civilized discussion or exchange of ideas and opinions. The million-people unity march through Paris last Sunday is an affirmation of that, and all good people – journalists or not – must hold up a pencil and stand on the side of free expression and against all violence.

Here at the office we began figuring out the line of fire should there be an attack, with some wanting to move or re-align their desks. Some suggested putting up a sign, “This way to the cartoonist” to direct attackers – who could be any one of the many groups and people (including some of us here in the office) he has lampooned – straight to our irreverent editorial cartoonist (even his comic strips are impertinent) to avoid collateral damage (meaning us).

Will we be attacked? That isn’t really a question we intend to answer, or maybe even dwell on considerably. We work in a newspaper – we report the news, we foster dialogue, we encourage discussion and an exchange of opinion. Certainly the opinions come in all shades – our late founding publisher used to say that we have an opinion column for every prejudice – and more often than not we don’t agree with each other. But that is the whole point of discussion – to talk it out, to make your case, to try and convince, and if you don’t succeed in convincing the other guy, keep your opinion and go your way. You do not – ever – try and shoot the other guy down.