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Sunday, November 14, 2004
Obenieta: Romancing the rehab
By Myke U. Obenieta
Sun.star essay
Suppose you’re such a fly in the ointment of peace and order, and a woebegone woman had just thrown herself down the path of a rampaging Rough Rider bus simply because she regretted the fact that she is your mother. So where do you, sore with remorse, go from here?
Okay, salvation is not entirely a spaced-out possibility. Some sinners became saints, remember? And so, an option opens itself as if a thunderbolt of epiphany has just cracked your skull open. An idea, indeed, blooming like a water lily out of your head somebody ought to have cut off earlier and flung down the river. Ah, rehabilitation. Sounds like resurrection, whoa! On the verge of a bright new lease on life, even your mother six feet under would be thrilled to the bone.
So there you go, after painting the town blood-red with your recklessness, head over heels on the way to either the Bagong Buhay Rehabilitation Center (BBRC) or the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center (CPDRC). Boy, who says you don’t have a choice?
Of course, you’re no wimp to weep over spilt milk and suck dry the drivel about how your back has been pushed to the wall smeared with the grime of crime, echoing the call of the wild. But from the pit of your hardboiled heart, a remnant of faith could have resurfaced to reassure you this: it’s never too late to climb that wall and jump to the other side where you could be purged.
Purgatory, after all, is a prerequisite for purification en route to redemption. But before you reach that place defined as a “temporary condition of torment or suffering,” and brace yourself for an exercise in expiation, you must— and here’s the rub--- be whittled down to the level of worms first. To be squashed till your spirit rise from the remains of your damned days. This, hands down, is deliverance.
Might this also explain the average of two inmates reportedly dying each month inside the BBRC where seven jailbirds succumbed to various ailments last October alone? Or why the warden at CPDRC is now as good as dead after Capitol’s surprise inspection yielded a freight of prohibited drugs, deadly weapons like improvised Molotov bombs (on top of mahjong sets, x-rated videos, and fake money bills)?
And you, bless your guts, might as well spit the shock and the opprobrium away. To the faces of those aghast at the awful things happening in the rehabilitation centers, you could throw, say, a paperback of Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” and prove that even a hilltop abbey--- postcard-perfect for suckers of serenity--- can be the scene of acts most dastardly.
Why, you can even wax poetic and recite how rehabilitation’s “stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage, that minds innocent and quiet take that for an hermitage.” Yes, say all that as you, lying in peace, cross your hardened heart.
(November 14, 2004 issue)
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