Anger, disobedience vs. evil

DIE HARD III
Herman Tiu Laurel
6/13/2005



Anyone who makes a sweeping condemnation of anger misses one of the greatest treasures of the human character – righteous anger. It is the same anger in the face, mouth and fists of Bonifacio at the Monumento so perfectly captured by Filipino sculptor Guillermo Tolentino to represent the fire of our Philippine Revolution; it is the same tempest painted by countless masters onto the Christ against the moneychangers at the temple. I have been seen raging, and even my columns are often on fire; it is indeed partly deliberate, to make the rationale think and wonder why I may be mad.

Last Friday night I raged at a PNP officer named Bondoc, and it was captured on TV. It happened because this officer, with a few underlings, took charge of dispersing a crowd of peacefully assembled urban poor group at the San Carlos Seminary gate who had placards calling for “Truth” (katotohanan) and chanting slogans supporting former NBI deputy director Samuel Ong’s fight. The harassed and threatened the hapless protesters with threats of arrest and physical bullying. When Senator Serge Osmeña alighted from his car I requested him to give this officer a brief on the right to assembly.

Serge obliged, I spotted Bondoc who tried to scurry away; but I caught up and made him face Osmeña. Why was this cop running away? Because he knows what he does in driving away protesters is wrong, yet he does it anyway and this enrages me. You want to reason with such characters who will do what is wrong even if they know it? Serge had his moment with Bondoc then junta-leader-wanna-be Abat arrived and had his minute of klieg lights, but on the wrong side, justifying the police suppression instead of supporting the right to protest.

Under the Arroyo regime the right to assemble and expression has been systematically cut down and up. They not only block exit and entry points at and from communities where marches can start, they climb up passenger buses to seek out potential groups and send them back or pedestrians walking in threes or fours and harassing them. This is a deliberate policy and tactic to break up any assembly before bigger groups are formed of perfectly peaceful and legitimate assembly. Should one still try to reason with such a policy? Rage and counter-attack is the necessary response.

To rage is not automatically to be violent. The counter-attack can be in many forms. Civil disobedience (CD), popularized in philosophy by Thoreau and practiced victoriously by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King who said: "I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest."

It was Gandhi who elevated civil disobedience to the sublime with his Satyagraha, active non-violence. He gave it a philosophy and a religion, in a way, and liberated a nation from colonial rule with it. I have long advocated the use of the two to overcome the control of evil over our society, of which my first personal experiment was that stand at Makati Avenue in the Oakwood rally which some still remember where I stood up to the tear gas and stopped a wall of riot shields until some PNP plainclothers tackled me to the pavement. Now, President Estrada has also called for civil disobedience.

Civil disobedience is not new in the Philippines, and only last April there were attempts to launch a “tax boycott” due to the ever increasing and increasingly oppressive taxes put on the people. We do, however see more and more civil disobedience now being practiced, such as the tens of thousands who now hold the GMA-Garcy tapes in their hands in defiance of GMA, Wycoco and DOJ’s Raul Gonzales’ threats of arrest; that’s thanks to Alan Paguia. Sammy Ong is exercising civil disobedience by defying wrong laws and bringing out the truth despite the threats of prosecution or even murder.

“Non-cooperation with evil”, that is the key idea in Civil Disobedience; there are tactics and strategies involved, but the essential is to defy the evil. In our case as Filipinos today, it is the defy the evil of lies that have taken over all our legal social institutions. There is the evil lie of Edsa Dos and its persecution of an innocent and elected leader, the evil lie of the economic system that lets the “market” rule over human values, the evil lie of a government erected on the foundation of cheating and corruption, the evil lie of “law enforcement agencies” that is built on jueteng money and violations of law.

For our last paragraph we move on to a crucial question: who should take over after GMA flies to her exile? We have always said that it’s not a question of whom but of what? We are supposed to be a society ruled by rules and not by men, and the most fundamental rule is the Constitution as it was remembered when it was last alive – January 20, 2001 at 12:26:59 noon the second before Gloria was illegally sworn in.

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