The Cebu Pacific flight for Tuguegarao is no earlier than close to noontime. It seems, however, that one of the symptoms of my neurosis is that I leave my hotel for the airport at 6:30 in the morning and to aim to be done with the entire rigmarole of checking in by 7:30 or 8, at the latest. Then I can loiter around the airport’s shops—not because I always have the wherewithal to make purchases—but because I find that the far preferable thing to do than fretting at a later time that the gate may close on me!
No one, however, who has been through the final baggage check section of Terminal 3 (the terminal for Tuguegarao flights) will fail to notice the rudeness of the personnel there. They yell at passengers and bark out orders like they hold the keys to our destinies. “Empty your pockets.” “Wallets and cellphones inside your bags.” “Remove your belts.” None of these justifies the menacing, imperious tone these functionaries of state are wont to use. There is nothing of urgency in these instructions, no clear and present danger to contend with. They are instructions that can be conveyed in a respectful manner, in a respectful tone of voice. But alas, rudeness, it seems, has become a national virtue!
Unlike the typical virtue to which corresponds a vice, the opposite of respect is manifold, because it has to do with the acknowledgment and the recognition of the human person. Respect comes in the course of recognition—not that it is a matter of course, because quite clearly respect no longer comes as a matter of course in this country that is apparently making its way speedily into the shadows. Not niceties are what we deal with here when it is respect with reckon with but ethics: being human, being just. What it is about the human person that renders everyone respectable? Here, “respectable” has nothing to do with pompousness and with airs put on by the self-important but with a fundamental claim that may not always be made and articulated, but that the very humanity of the other makes. There have been various ways of referring to it. It is the rationality that sets him above all other inhabitants of the planet. It is self-determination that makes him subject to none though he may be held captive by others. It is the majesty of the Face, says Levinas, that resists its reduction to a concept. It is the fundamental mark of the human person, said Cicero, as self-governing. In the hollowed words of the Scriptures, it is because Adam and Eve were created in imago et similtudo Dei…in the image and likeness of God and the Divine breath, breathed into their nostrils. And because we speak Latin when we deal with things sublime, we also say: her respectability is a concomitant of her humanitas.
But the rudeness at the airport is just one manifestation of the disturbing wave of disrespect that has surged on our shores. The very thought that some lives are not worth protection and are in fact disposable because they are “criminal lives,” “dangerous lives,” “treacherous lives” is a more insidious form of this national crisis of spirit. The ridicule that persons with non-traditional sexual orientations have to put up with and the persistent forms of trafficking in human persons, especially by recruiters of overseas workers who send off fellow Filipinos abroad, there to suffer conditions of virtual enslavement are other disheartening manifestations of a decadent culture of disrespect.
There is no national exigency, no emergency or urgency that ever justifies a waiver of the demands of due process. Fundamentally, we have to do here with the recognition of the worth, the value, the sacredness of the human person. Due process is procedural respect for the inviolability of the human person. The claim that the need to stem the tide of a dangerous form of criminality such as the peddling of drugs justifies dispensing with the tedious demands of due process is self-defeating. It involves a performative contradiction, for what tribute is given the dignity and the sacredness of the human persons in whose defense one avows to wage a war on criminality if one is prepared to trample on the humanity of those one suspects of offending against the law? Respect for the human person admits of no discrimination. Discrimination is the antithesis of respect and has, in human history, been one of the most egregious forms of disrespect.
We make no progress at all by regressing into a disrespectful, rude society—and disrespect covers an entire gamut ranging from the rudeness with which simple instructions are conveyed to the inhumanity by which those we characterize as outcasts are gunned down without process or ceremony. It has to do with the language we speak, with personal deportment demanded of those in the public eye—and there is no question here of hypocrisy that puts on good behavior for public viewing but that privately engages in lewdness and prurience. There is no necessity to the disjunction. It does not serve us in any way to present ourselves to the world as uncouth, and to act towards each other without that solemn regard for each other as human persons—the hallmark of advance in our evolution as human.
rannie_aquino@outlook.com
rannie_aquino@sanbeda.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@csu.edu.ph