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Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Obenieta: Blood in their eyes
By Myke U. Obenieta
So to Speak
If you ask some children whose curiosity makes them kind of cat-eyed, there’s nothing awry about the grisly and the wild.
Wonder is wide-eyed, indeed. More so if innocence inquires with knitted brows: How come adults are ever so disposed at whittling down the world to the level of spilt blood?
Where murder is almost as compelling as a call of nature—considering the notoriety of motorcycle-riding masked men for raising a stink in their wake—who’s stopping the children from coming to terms with the harsh facts around them, riddled with a reality check?
See no evil. To quell the inquisitive streak of the young in the face of criminality in the city, Councilor Gerardo Carillo is up with his proposed resolution to be tackled during the Cebu City Council session tomorrow. Wary of “the trauma that violence may cause on children,” Carillo wants the police to extend the police line around crime scenes, keep the children away and prevent them from viewing bloodied bodies of crime victims. He’s hoping as well that barangay officials will prohibit the children from going near the crime scene.
Only this way, he thinks, can he appease those concerned and complaining about children ogling at the sprawled body of murder victims. “Like they were simply watching Mickey Mouse lying on the ground,” worries a reader who explained she was shocked to see a newspaper photo showing a number of children casually looking at the body of a vigilante victim. “Are we so irresponsible that we place parental guidance warnings for TV shows, but allow our children to see actual scenes of violence?” she frets. “These young children will grow to see violence as a very casual matter. I don’t oppose vigilantism but I don’t see the point why we allow our people to freely view crime scenes, especially the young.”
She might as well have sighed, in sync with William Golding’s lament for that “world of longing and baffled common-sense” (from his novel, Lord of the Flies, a cautionary tale set in the jungle about children turning into copycats of the barbaric reflex of adults). An elegy to a paradise lost, or so Golding deemed his book in which he cast a cold eye not only at the grown-ups but also at the boys marooned in an island after a plane crash. It’s tricky to govern society in a spic-and-span manner without reckoning first the foibles, if not the predatory instinct of human nature, Golding suggested.
Get real, Golding could have spat out at those who wish innocence would remain unblemished even as they blindly gloss over the glaring ugliness of vigilante killings.
Where real life looms stranger or bloodier than fiction, nothing’s more puzzling than a good intention turning fuzzy. So who says lack of understanding or failure to see the bigger picture is a liability of children only?
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (June 6, 2006 issue)
Write letter to the editor.Click here.
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