ONE way I relax these days is by playing a game on my phone called Two Dots. It’s a simple puzzle that appeals to people who enjoy pattern recognition and are a bit compulsive. (No judgment. I’m one of you.)
Although it’s been around for five years, I downloaded it only two weeks ago and will probably stop playing it within the month, because life has revealed that all the time I spent sitting idly while trying to outrun monkeys in Temple Run, throwing fowl in Angry Birds or harvesting potatoes in Farm Town, I will never get back.
Before I uninstall Two Dots, though, I’d like to understand something about it.
Every time you play the game, you get five lives. A life ends whenever you fail to solve a level, and it takes 20 minutes to regenerate. Whenever you lose a life, the screen reveals a drawing of a cute, curly-haired girl who wears a pair of aviator goggles like a headband. I’ve just learned her name is Amelia. Perhaps she’s meant to evoke Amelia Earhart and make you feel you’re doing something adventurous, instead of wasting time repeatedly moving your fingertip across a screen. Anyway.
What’s puzzling about Amelia is the message she places on-screen whenever you lose a life. “Ack!” she exclaims. “You lost a life!” The line below that adds, “Only a minor setback.” Obviously, that’s meant to encourage you to keep on playing when you still have lives to live. But it’s also a little careless, no? I know I am overthinking this, but why is the loss of a life “only a minor setback”? Perhaps the game designers could have called it a turn, instead of a life.
Amelia’s cryptic message came to mind when I first heard the news last week that around 15 men had barged into a hospital in Medellin town and shot Councilor Ricardo Ramirez. The former mayor had been detained for about two years when he was killed. No one among his attackers has been identified yet.
Two days later, officer Deogenes Carrillo of the Cordova Police Station was also gunned down, but unlike that on Ramirez, the attack took place in daylight, less than two hours before noon.
Two other high-profile individuals were shot and killed in Cebu from January to May this year, when the gun ban for the election period was in effect.
Four men gunned down former Criminal Investigation and Detection Group 7 operations chief Delfin Bontuyan as he waited for a traffic light to change in the North Reclamation Area. It was a few minutes before 3 p.m. Four months before that, former government prosecutor Mary Ann Castro was driving on Escario St. before 10 p.m. on a Thursday when a man on a motorcycle pulled up near her, fired, and left her for dead.
Carrillo, I had never met before. Bontuyan, Castro, and Ramirez were all, at one point, news sources whose names I regularly read in the stories my former newsroom colleagues had filed. I thought that being in public service, they led safer lives than the rest of us. If they had made any enemies after years in government, surely those enemies would choose to speak up against them or bring them to court, rather than pay someone to silence them for good. What is a life worth these days? The amounts mentioned in the anecdotes I’ve heard are staggering, because they are so low. A mid-range cell phone would cost more.
And when our fellow citizens talk on social media about these murders, some of them can be surprisingly callous. Amid the expressions of sympathy for the families of those slain, there are those who say that what happened was a form of justice. I am often tempted to visit their profiles on Facebook, and I am often astounded that such sentiments came from real people, some of them churchgoing, Bible verse-quoting folks.
We lost a life: someone’s mother or father, someone’s partner or friend. Why are we being taught to feel it was merely a minor setback? Why is no one being held accountable?