Jasmine.

What a year 2009 was for Filipinos!

It’s as if all the constellations conspired to mess up and displace balance and harmony in this world. Like everyone else, I am fervently wishing for this chaos to be over soon. However much you decide to be positive — when you witness all these kinds of violence, there’s no way you can attain serenity. The recent Maguindanao carnage is a fitting culmination to what this country is experiencing. When you look back, 2009 has  represented nothing but the dismal spectre of death.  Its harrowing presence chills my spine. Give me some good reasons to be optimistic about. Oh sure, call me pessimistic. Tell me I’m looking at it half-empty and not half full. But how else can you explain this year’s ghoulish state? Oh yeah, there were certainly big-time awards gotten by Pinoys here and there (Brillantes,  Penaflorida, etc) and it makes me so proud, but sadly they appear irrelevant once you factor in all the bad-lucks that befell this country.

What do you think 2009 is?

2009 is Ondoy and Pepeng. 2009 is abducted journalists and punished civil society advocates. 2009 is economic recession. 2009 is food shortage. 2009 is poverty multiplied ten times. 2009 is controversial electioneering. 2009 is AH1N1 virus.

But the most heartbreaking (and perhaps the ghastliest) was all over the news last Monday — the election-related Maguindanao massacre that ended the lives of some fifty lawyers, journalists, politicians, and civilians in Mindanao. This time, no one can point to it as mere sensational news casting or news writing. This is reality. This is OUR reality. How can our leaders sleep in peace knowing that lurking out there are demons ready to kill at the slightest sign of opposition? Do they even know what conscience means? Why do they have to treat the perpetrators like kings and leave the victims clamoring for justice? These killers are no humans! I thought such forms of power-tripping monsters only happen in movies. What’s missing though are real leaders and policy-makers who can put this pandemonium to rest. In that analogy, movies become superior.

Looking at the excavated cadavers, I felt how it must have been with the families they left, or the many other people who will benefit from their good will in the future. I may not have blood-relations with the victims. But we all share in the blood that runs within our veins. We are, after all, Filipinos. Let this chaos end. Please, let there be no more of these misfortunes in 2010.