The Living Years - Mike and the Mechanics

Every generation
Blames the one before
And all of their frustrations
Come beating on your door

I know that I'm a prisoner
To all my father held so dear
I know that I'm a hostage
To all his hopes and fears
I just wish I could have told him
In the living years

Crumpled bits of paper
Filled with imperfect thought
Stilted conversations
I'm afraid that's all we've got

You say you just don't see it
He says it's perfect sense
You just can't get agreement
In this present tense
We all talk a different language
Talking in defence

Say it loud, say it clear
You can listen as well as you hear
It's too late when we die

To admit we don't see eye to eye
So we open up a quarrel
Between the present and the past
We only sacrifice the future
It's the bitterness that lasts

So don't yield to the fortunes
You sometimes see as fate
It may have a new perspective
On a different day
And if you don't give up,
And don't give in
You may just be OK

Say it loud, say it clear
You can listen as well as you hear
It's too late when we die
To admit we don't see eye to eye

I wasn't there that morning
When my father passed away
I didn't get to tell him
All the things I had to say.
I think I caught his spirit
Later that same year
I'm sure I heard his echo
In my baby's new born tears
I just wish I could have told him
In the living years

Say it loud, say it clear
You can listen as well as you hear
It's too late when we die
To admit we don't see eye to eye

Impunity

Theres The Rub
Impunity
By Conrado de Quiros
Philippine Daily InquirerFirst Posted 21:19:00 11/25/2009

THE question is, “Why?” I do not just mean this in the sense of patent motivations. The people who massacred—never has that word resonated more grimly—Toto Mangudadatu’s followers on their way to the provincial capitol to file his candidacy obviously did it to prevent him from filing his candidacy. Completely literally, by physically removing the people who were going to do the filing.

I mean “why” in the sense of why they imagined this thing could possibly just blow by after some time. I mean “why” in the sense of why they imagined they could possibly survive the fallout from it. I mean “why” in the sense of how they could possibly have contemplated it at all.
Common sense must tell you that if you wreak havoc of this scale, you wreak havoc on yourself as well, inviting as you do the visitation of the furies. And havoc doesn’t begin to describe what happened. As of this writing, the death toll has risen to 52. These are numbers you normally see only during disasters, or war. Storms, however, do not rape women. Floods do not mutilate men. Earthquakes do not decapitate people. Those were the things that happened to the group that tried to make their way to the capitol.

Most of the dead were journalists. According to our correspondent in the area, Aquiles Zonio, among the 58 persons in the group, 37 were so. Some 25 of them died there, the biggest casualty of journalists in a single act of mayhem in the world. Zonio himself would have been among the dead, except that he and a couple of others went back for some stuff in their hotel. The killing of the journalists was clearly no accident. Several men on motorcycles were asking the hotel manager after them.

Just as clearly, the military and police were in on it. Zonio recalls that Toto Mangudadatu had begged Chief Supt. Paisal Umpa, Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) police regional director, to provide an escort, but was turned down. He begged the Army commander in the province to do the same, but was turned down as well. When the danger was clear and present, his opponent having repeatedly vowed mayhem on him if he went on to contest the governor’s seat. For all intents and purposes, the group had been served up to the cutthroats on a silver platter.

Most mind-bogglingly of all, the author of this monstrosity never bothered to hide his hand. Maguindanao Gov. Andal Ampatuan, who ran unopposed in 2007, had made his wishes clear: He meant to continue to run unopposed forever. He had made his wishes clear specifically to Mangudadatu, punctuating his earnestness by graphic descriptions of the consequences that awaited him if he did not heed it. He had done so openly, publicly, repeatedly. And as if to prove that he was a man of his word—like a medieval warlord or modern-day Mafia don, who thought his position would weaken if he could not back it up with deeds—the massacre happened. Suspect, hell, his signature is written all over it.

Common sense must tell you that if you wreak havoc of this scale, you wreak havoc on yourself as well. But that is common sense for the rest of the world, that is not common sense for that part of the world. For the rest of the world, mounting a massacre of that depth and savagery, conscripting the police and military into it, and doing so to make a statement—it’s not even daring the world to do something about it, presuming as that does a sense of consequence—is beyond contemplation. In that part of the world, it is, if not entirely par for the course, just pushing the envelope on balance of terror.

That is the heart of “impunity,” a concept we normally associate with wantonness, whim and mindlessness. It is nothing of the kind. It is tunnel vision in ways that (to us at least) adds whole new meanings to the word “tunnel.” It is narrowness to a point of blindness. In Ampatuan’s reckoning, the equation is simple. He gets rid of a rival, he puts fear in the hearts of future rivals, and he will always be protected by Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. It’s not that nothing else matters, it’s that nothing else exists.

The truly mind-boggling thing about the massacre is not that it happened, it is that it was contemplated at all. The truly chilling thing about the massacre is not that it left decapitated bodies, it was that it points to decapitated minds.
In the end, you truly have to gape in awe at the price we’ve had to pay for keeping GMA all these years. The problem in Maguindanao was there long before her, but not to a point where we are looking not just at a different culture, not just at a different country, not just even at a different planet but at a different plane of existence. It’s a perversion of every truth we hold to be self-evident, not the least of them that the vote is sacred, the public will is sacred, life is sacred. It is perversion so systematic it carries with it its own violent logic: the vote is meaningless, the public’s will is the warlord’s will, life is puny. There is method in that madness, and there is madness in that method.

In the rest of the world, common sense dictates that you do not reward the murderers by giving them more power with a state of emergency. Common sense dictates that you replace the military and police officials there wholesale, that you send combat troops to disarm (and shoot them if they resist) Ampatuan’s private army, that you drag Ampatuan in chains to Manila, under heavy guard by PMA cadets, to make sure his escorts are still incorruptible. Hell, common sense dictates that you throw out GMA, knowing that so long as she is there, no harm will happen to Ampatuan. So long as she is there, no good will happen to this country. So long as she is there, so long will be unleashed that logic from hell called:
Impunity.