Savagery in the name of culture

Herbie Gomez .

THE brutal killing of former Xavier University philosophy teacher Gexie Ray Ungab brought to the fore the need for the 21st century man to re-think the way he looks at certain things and situations. Not everything passed on to us by our ancestors deserve to be kept especially if these cross the line, go beyond the bounds of reason and strip us of our humanity.

Here was a promising young man from the town of Tagoloan, aged 23 years, probably killed with same gusto a Homo erectus had as it butchered and feasted on its prey like a ferocious lion with its hand ax of stone about two million years ago. But unlike us, Homo sapiens, the Homo erectus can be excused in that the archaic hominid, long extinct, had a brain smaller than its teeth.

Exactly how Gexie Ray’s savage killers started to desecrate the body of the young victim is unclear but we can deduce based on the accounts on the appearance of his remains that he was maimed first with a barrage of gunshots to the lower limbs so that escape would be an impossibility. With his lower bones crushed, and leg muscles and tendons mangled by bullets, it was easy for the savages to do whatever they wanted to their prey, and that included showing him how they deprive a man of his masculinity before the repeated sword slashings and thrustings began.

How, pray tell, could something like this happen in 21st century Philippines?

And exactly what did the young man do to deserve such savagery? Was it a crime of passion? Or was it because he fell for someone from another culture that sees a certain kind of interrelationship as taboo?

No matter how sincerely held, the idea of savagery and death as punishment for something like this is unacceptable, unreasonable and inhumane. It is, in fact, a chauvinistic concept, propagated, by the way, by European and Middle Eastern men from the Medieval Period or even at a much earlier time, who had no concept whatsover of gender equality. It is an idea that directly challenges and clashes with reason and our humanity, no different from what a prejudiced Roman apostle earlier taught his married female followers to do: hyponymy or submission to the “superior” male species! Modern man knows how sexist and crazy ridiculous that idea is now.

The greater tragedy here is not the gruesome murder but the seeming inability of this government to ensure that the victim’s family can cry out for justice and to send the message that crime does not pay. It’s not that the Ungab family is disinterested. By now, authorities know that the family’s quest for justice has been suppressed by threats of more harm or death by those responsible for the abomination. Clearly, the family has been ballyragged into submission and silence by those who did them wrong.

The question now, I suppose, is on what the government would do so that citizens in need of justice can do so in an environment that should be favorable to justice seekers and not the other way around. Simply put, the government cannot allow the environment to remain friendly to these criminal savages, and it must make a crime like this a highisk undertaking so that those thinking of doing it again would think a hundred times. But in this situation, unfortunately, the public is seeing a miscarriage of justice even before the process could begin. Worse, the government’s message seems to be “no one is above the law and crime does not pay except when culture is invoked.”

What is the message we are hearing from the government here? Forget about it and just move on? Charge the grisly murder to experience? Quits? Is that it?

I find it unacceptable that culture is being used as some sort of an excuse for the brutal killing. No, culture does not justify murder in the 21st century. Something that, supposedly, is part of a culture is not a justification. Any culture anywhere in this world that tries to justify torture, savagery and cold-blooded murder is not standing on moral high ground. It has no place in a civilized society.

No, Gexie Ray Ungab did not do anything to deserve what was done to him. The Age of Reason should have put an end to the period of human sacrifice, impalements, burning witches at the stake, and stoning heretics and apostates to death, a long time ago. Pastilan.