Jose Mangkukwenta

Written on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 2:52 pm | by benign0

Conrado de Quiros’s “rage” is understandable (thanks by the way to Ding for bringing our attention to this “rage”).

I will wait to unburden myself of my feelings toward Ces’ captors until the matter is successfully resolved. But I will not wait to unburden myself of my rage at something that has been going on for some time but which, unlike Ces’ abduction, has not met with intense and scrupulous concern in this country.

What I do wonder about though is if this same “rage” will be felt if Jose Mangkukwenta — the Accountant — were to be kidnapped while auditing a mine deep in the jungles of Benguet.

Let’s explore this theoretical kidnapping-of-an-accountant scenario. Substituting some words in de Quiros’s article (in bold below), we could argue in a similar vein:

The other thing that [Jose Mangkukwenta’s] abduction drives home is that when something like this happens, it is not just the [accounting] community that is oppressed, it is the national community itself. It is every one of us.

How does that sound now?

Even more interesting are the questions begged with regard to what is said earlier in de Quiros’s article:

If [Drilon’s] situation today says anything, it is that she had as much right to be in Pen then as she has to be in Sulu today. That is what journalists do—or at least journalists worth their salt: They cover events, wherever they find them, whenever they find them, however they find them.

I detect a bit of confusion here between the idea of having a right to be someplace and the idea of having a choice to be someplace.

Ces Drilon had as much right as any Pinoy to be where she was when she was abducted. But then not every Pinoy hangs around such places by choice.

When it comes down to an allocation of public resources to mitigate certain situations, we should be aware of the above differentiation to make an apples-to-apples comparison of scenarios to prioritise.

In my view, the thing that most horrifies people about violent crime is when a victim is taken at random. The more random the choice of victim, the more horrifying it comes across to us kibitzers. Random acts of violence invoke the chilling it-could-happen-to-ME scenario in our reptilian complexes — being attacked in an environment where injury or death is perceived to be unlikely: our homes, our immediate neighbourhoods, our schools, our offices, our local communities, etc. This is why massacres in schools by crazies suddenly running berserk, or serial murderers who choose their victims on the sole basis of how they happen to look strike more fear in people’s hearts than crimes of passion or family/political vendettas.

We take comfort in statistics that tell us that a significant proportion of murder victims were killed by someone they know, and within that set, an even bigger proportion by someone they are related to.

We want the crimes we see to have calculated reasons and pre-meditated motives.

We fear more for our safety when violence becomes random and irrational.

In the case of Drilon’s plight, the Average Pinoy Schmoe could be thinking: “Jeez, I’ll just strike Sulu out of my places-to-visit-before-I-die list”. Beyond that, it does not send that it-could-happen-to-ME chill down the average person’s spine. It is not a case of a victim being at the wrong place at the wrong time. It is a case of a victim being at the right place at the right time. A jaywalker. A person sneaking up to a horse from behind. A person swimming with sharks. A person walking into a bull ring dressed in red. A person playing with fire.

The Philippines as it happens is a circus. So maybe it may be good to use a circus analogy in this instance:

Which would be a more disturbing scenario: (1) a lion suddenly losing it and attacking a PROFESSIONAL animal trainer who had earlier stepped into its cage to face it for show? OR (2) the same lion escaping from its cage and attacking a member of the audience?

Which of the above two could happen to YOU?

That brings us to the whole question of where exactly we should be allocating our public safety resources and focusing the better part of our sensibilities. Should attention (and presumably priority) be focused on building better cages and implementing safety measures around their use? Or should attention (and presumably priority) be focused on the trouble a person whose profession it is to climb into the cage of a beast occassionally gets into?

Tags:
Add to del.icio.us | Digg this! | Yahoo MyWeb | Google Bookmark It! | Stumble It!
About The Author: benign0 is the Webmaster of GetRealPhilippines.COM and has once been described as "one of the most enthusiastic hecklers of the politically-passionate" by a respected journalist.

Filed Under National News, Society

Related Entries:

Comments

3 Responses to “Jose Mangkukwenta”

  1. cvj on June 16th, 2008 4:15 pm

    Your ability to turn Ces Drilon’s ongoing kidnapping into an issue about you is without parallel (at least that’s what i hope).

  2. Mikey_Liling on June 16th, 2008 4:56 pm

    Would the same argument apply to our law enforcers, also “choosing” to put themselves on harm’s way? Should we also question them for choosing such a profession? The job comes with the territory, and I believe every journalist like Ces, who’s chasing for the mother of all scoops, knows all the pitfalls. If not, then they should switch to reporting local showbiz news.

    Having said that, ranking the level of disgust over crime based on probability and proximity, maybe that is our problem. A crime is a crime, just because the likelihood of personally happening to you is slim to none, that doesn’t mean that you should not take a pause and say a prayer, at the least. Trivializing a crime is the worst crime one can commit.

    BTW, a more disturbing scenario is to find the animal trainer inside a cage, with three jumping poodles in tutus, while the escaped lion is just outside the tent, eating the cotton candy vendor.

  3. And then there was silence… | Filipino Voices on June 27th, 2008 6:37 pm

    […] the Average Pinoy Schmoe, ferry disasters invoke the disturbia of that chilling it-could-happen-to-me feeling. But then the 2010 elections are just around the corner. There are other more important […]

Leave a Reply