Ravaging in the Rains

Under the torrential rains, half past four in the afternoon, a Grade 4 pupil rushes along the side of the street to get home. Amid the haste, he unintentionally dips his foot on the ditch, soaking his sock and shoe clad foot with muddied water. In a regular day (and by regular, we mean, “sunny”), he would have seen and avoided that dugout very clearly and very easily. But since the waters have accumulated to a precursor to a flood, that simple task had become difficult. Why is he still in school in this harsh weather anyway? It seems very obvious that it would be unsafe for people, more so for children to brave the streets with the rains raging all about. But schoolchildren have to go out to go to school, and have to go out again to go home, for the simple reason that it is a school day. No matter what circumstance awaits on the road, it is a school day. Despite the reality that thunders across the clouds and splashes across their faces, authorities have to wait for official data to determine suspension of classes. Do we wait for a certain number of barangays experiencing a certain height of flood before we keep the kids from getting out? Common sense seems to have become desensitized with regulations and scientific data. Back in simpler times, any adult would tell the children not to go out, or even suspend their own trade when downpour gets too heavy, coupled with crashes of thunder and lightning. But in this modern age, reports and data have to be depended upon, despite your own head, back and feet getting soaked in rainwater. The modern man in the new millennium would disregard the real rain, but have to rely on regulation. Furthermore, why does this caution of suspension of work and class strongly exist? Is there a fear of missing low on number of work or class hours? Have those now become paramount over health and safety?

In the backdrop of the silencing rainwater and subsiding floodwater, join me in laying a the freshest flowers in grieving heartbreak over the desecration of amity of the community. Have we not read of accounts of attempts here and there, of maidens gone missing? But I suppose some of those reports had been dismissed as crafts of creativity due to inconsistent circumstances or incomplete particulars. Perhaps, some may have considered such stories as having gone beyond the boundaries of credibility. Then, alarm of reports of a missing female student crept like an electric shock across the public. Then, my spirit got crushed in the hearing of the recovery of what was left of esteem and dignity. If it is any consolation, it is somewhat fortunate that the discovery took sooner than those of other cases. Truth eventually came out from under empty sandbags.

About this time last year, our community’s peace and innocence was massacred. Those were young school children who also braved the rains and floods because data was still insufficient for a class suspension. In the aftermath, young lives laid dead and the survivors would get rattled in the slightest rumble. Whatever happened to that? Have they even gotten hold of the madman who indiscriminately showered bullets from his rifle?

The suspected perpetrator (Is he really? After going through a barrage of the Percy Lapid case, I can’t help doubting supposed suspects if they really justified suspects or purported suspects for the sake of appeasing the public.) seemed to have stay around. Other perpetrators would have gotten a headstart from pursuing police by running away even before being declared as a suspect. Did he not expect to be discovered or caught? Did he expect that the public would go clueless ? Did he expect that he would get away with it all? This is of course, in the assumption that he really is the wrongdoer.

I don’t care if someone would say that such cases have occurred in other places. Such disgrace, even one, should not be accepted as common place in our community. We should rise in revolt against the ravaging and rape of our community. But how do we restrain the rise of lusts in the flesh of man that can find its fulfillment in the darkest of places, away from the prevention of those in power? Now, don’t be telling that anyone of us should not have been caught at a certain place on a certain time of the day or night. All burden of guilt should be carried by that who commits crime.

I say it again, revolt against the ravaging and rape of our community.

““Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless…” -Isaiah 1:17