I was supposed to leave Facebook forever.
I was disappointed with the social media platform, and my disgust started when Mark Zuckerberg defended his companyâs decision to not to take any action on a controversial post by US President Donald Trump that glorified violence, when Trump posted, âwhen the looting begins, the shooting begins,â which many people interpreted as a call for violence in nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd. And while Twitter, courtesy of its CEO Jack Dorsey, put a warning label over the tweet, flagging it as violent content that broke the companyâs policies, Zuckerberg declined to take any action on a similar post on his site.
And then there was the news of Facebook cracking down on posts slamming the anti-terror bill.
Now comes the creation of dummy accounts by paid trolls, against those who have been vocal about Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte.
And so, in my disappointment, I already requested for the permanent deletion of both my Facebook accounts.
But guess what? I changed my mind.
Why?
If we leave, they win. We lose.
Because now, now is not the time to be disappointed. Now, now is the time to get mad. Now is the time to get mad AND to get even.
And when Iâm mad, I write. Thatâs the only thing I know how to do well. And thatâs what I am going to do and do regularly, from now on.
So expect more long-form content on this blog: essays and criticism on Duterte and his administration, which will promptly be posted and shared on both my Facebook accounts.
Because, make no mistake about it:
This means war. But not a war against the virus going around and spreading in this pandemic. This is a war against something more insidious, something more vicious.
This is a war against those in power who think they are free to take away our freedom and liberties, those in power who think they are free to take our lives, a war against those in power who hide behind a faceless army of killers in motorcycles, an army of killers in uniform, an army of paid online trolls.
This is a war against those in power who think they are free to take away our voices.
Because, make no mistake about it:
If weâre silent, they win. We lose.
For now, though, I’ll leave you a beautiful write-up by Conrado de Quiros, on why he writes. Itâs a longish excerpt from the prologue of his second book, Dance of the Dunces.
***
Writing is hazardous to health. This is so because crooks and murderers, who may or may not read Plato, agree that the poet has no place in the Republic. Many of them think poetry is a communist front, and the poet has no place on earth. Prey to hunger and the attentions of the intelligence community, the writer can only cry out before the Department of Environment and National Resources, âNever mind the trees â save the writer!â
But if not for fame, fortune, and health, why does one write? Why does any reasonably sane man write?
Quite seriously, one writes because one must.
Jose Diokno once said that human rights are not something one has, they are something one is. They are essential to his being. Without them, he not only ceases to live well, he ceases to live at all. The same thing may be said about writing. It is not really something one does. It is something one is.
Writing, of course, is always writing about something. Iâve often been asked about why I write about the things I do. I write about them because, like Mount Everest, they are there. This is not a facetious answer. It is not always easy to see, or acknowledge, the thereness of things. The mind reels at the sight of unimaginable horror â of villagers who flee from burning houses and forage in forests, of children who die from mortar fire or grow old before their time, of wives who seek their husbands and find their heads floating in rivers. The mind reels at the sight of unimaginable horror, and imagines it is not there.
To see the thereness of mountains is not merely to see the tangle of green that mats their slopes and the mists that cling to their peaks. It is to see the cunning cut of rock and stone, the rivers that roil in the rain, and the slime that has gathered in the footpaths. Yet, for all this, it is to climb the mountain anway, at risk to life and limb.
Why does one do it? Why does one climb the mountain? Because he must. He does not do it for fame or fortune or health. He does it out of â despair: Because not to do so would be to disappear from the face of the earth as surely as from âsalvaging,â or melt like Salvador Daliâs liquid watches.
One climbs mountains because they are there. But, in the end, mountains are there because one has climbed them, if only in oneâs dreams.
Of course, writing is a choice too, as life is a choice. But it is the choice, to use another metaphor, of the tragic hero. It is the choice of Hector to fight or not to fight Achilles. Hector knows, as he broods over his fate on the eve of battle, that he will bite the dust. He knows that Achilles is invincible and seethes with rage at the death of his friend Patroclus. He knows that when the sun falls next day, his body will burn at the funeral pyre while Andromache grieves before it. But he emerges from the gates of Troy anway, his head held proudly before his enemy, his armor glinting in the sun.
Some call this a tragic flaw, a flaw in character that makes one do what he does â in a tragedy, to do so before the jaws of catastrophe. It is the compulsion that drives one to face his destiny, or destruction. But how gloriously! To stand on victory in the hour of seeming defeat. To laugh in the wind and cry, like Dylan Thomas, that death shall have no dominion!
Writing is a tragic flaw, too.
I do not mean by this only that writing hurls you into the catastrophe of death or detention, although, heaven knows, these are quite real consummations in these times. I mean that writing brings you to face the truth of your own world and of your own self. I mean that it brings you to face the unimaginable horrors of your own land and the even more unimaginable horrors of your own life. I mean that it brings you to look at the bloodstained face of humanity â and know that to turn away is to be turned into a pillar of salt.
I mean that writing brings you to face the truth. And truth is the greatest catastrophe of all.
The alternative is silence, a silence deep and elemental. There are, says the author of Silences â whose name I cannot now recall, as my copy of it is in transit â silences and silences. There is the pregnant silence of a writer whose mind is as the earth lying fallow in the sun to prepare for planting. There is the bitter silence of a man who must work for a living instead of write. And there is the silence of Rimbaud, the silence of a poet who squandered his gifts as a young man and chose to be silent. In old age, he would discover the ache of wanting to say things again, and discover, too, that through a pall of silence he had lost the very gift of utterance. Even dogs keen, they would cry out at deathâs door. How can men be silent, and not despair?
One writes because one must. As it is with human rights, writing is not an amenity of civilization, like tea. It is a source of life itself, like air. Just as well, one writes about things because one must. In the end, we do not really choose what to write. They choose us. They are there. We cannot choose to write only about the bright and cheerful in the thought that the spirit is set free only by them. The spirit cannot soar to the heavens on leaden wings, however it imagines that they are feathers. Or it cannot do so on fluff kept together by wax, as Icarus found out while falling into the sea.
The spirit soars to the heavens by looking at all that is there, by reviling the vile and revelling at the marvelous, by facing the truth of its world and itself, as Edmund Hilary once faced Mount Everest and Hector, Achilles, finding hope in despair, victory in defeat, life in death, by paring reality to the bone and dispelling the vapors of illusion, all the while telling the author of this voyage, this seeking, this confrontation, the terrible truth of its own being, âYou are neither god nor devil, priest nor soldier, bird nor snake:
âWriter ka lang pala.â
(Conrado de Quiros, 1991)
