Stop the killings! September 18, 2006

I SAID LAST WEEK THAT DOING UNTO JOVITO Palparan as he does to Bayan Muna, which is to send him to the next life, as the NPA threatened a couple of weeks ago, won’t make things better, it will make things worse. It won’t lessen the body count, it will jack it up.

At the very least, it will only give Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (GMA) her own 9/11, or the platform she needs to stand tall, which she very badly needs in more ways than one today. Particularly after the battering she got over the killings everywhere she went in her recent sortie abroad. At the very most, you can’t kill a bad idea with another bad idea. The only way to kill a bad idea is with a good idea. The only way to stop the killings is not to kill as well. It is to bring back an appreciation for the preciousness of life. The only way to rein in the dogs of war is to summon them back with the pipes of peace.

In this country, I do mean pipes in quite a literal sense. We Filipinos may have gotten deaf to many things, but we have not gotten deaf to songs. We Filipinos may have gotten deaf to the din of politics but we have not gotten deaf to the cacophony of music. That is so especially for the youth who find in songs the best way to express themselves and communicate to others.

It was in recognition of this that on March 16, a group of us, with little help from our friends, put up a concert at the Sunken Garden in UP called “Never Again: The Concert for Freedom.” GMA had just unleashed the dogs of dictatorship then with 1017, and we resolved to fight it with the rage of rhythm, the battering ram of chattering riffs. I personally was astonished by the enthusiasm with which it was greeted. The contributions poured in abundantly and, more importantly, the bands poured in spontaneously. There is a wellspring of anger at the stifling of freedom and there is an even bigger wellspring of goodwill for the sounds that break silence.

The signs of dictatorship have not disappeared, they have taken the more vicious form of wanton killings. Until the last couple of weeks, when GMA met with the revulsion of the civilized world, those killings were taking place at the rate of one a day—a dark parody of curbing population growth.

I still think music is the best way to fight it. With a little help from our friends, that’s what we are doing all over again. This time though, it won’t be a single concert, it will be a bar tour, entitled (with our every desire to stress its urgency) “Stop the Killings!” Every week, three bands or more will play in a bar in Metro Manila. They will either do covers or original compositions of antiwar, anti-violence and pro-peace songs. The songs need not be “political” in the narrow “protest” sense of the word. Songs like Gary Granada’s “Banko,” which proposes accommodation (easy enough to share a bench, why fight over it) and Tracy Chapman’s “Behind the Wall” or Suzanne Vega’s “Luka,” which talk of domestic violence, should as much be part of it as the Jerks’ “Rage” and Bob Dylan’s “God on Our Side,” which are more forthright excoriations of war and exploitation.

The bar tour kicks off on Sept. 21 for reasons that should be fairly obvious. Sept. 21 is the date Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law 34 years ago this Thursday, which became marked by the torture and slaughter of Filipinos, many of them barely past the flush of youth. Venue is 70s Bistro, 46 Anonas St., Quezon City, 8 p.m. The bands that will play there are (in order of playing time): The Dawn, The Jerks, Sandwich, Sugarfree, Brownman Revival, Radioactive Sago.

The next playing date is the first week of October, and every week after that. The bar tour goes on for as long as the killings go on. But our first leg ends on Dec. 10, International Human Rights Day. If things work out, and with the help of the human rights groups, we’ll hold a concert on that date.

So far the bands/singers that have offered to lend their magnificent services to the cause are: The Dawn, The Jerks, Radioactive Sago, Sandwich, Sugarfree, Brownman Revival, Gary Granada, Bayang Barrios, Cynthia Alexander, Chikoy Pura, Noel Cabangon, Susan Fernandez, Bagong Dugo, Gougou, Paramita, Spy, Giniling Festival, Session Road, Imago, Mojofly, Lyn Sherman, Color It Red, Paolo Santos, Pido, Parokya ni Edgar, Kamikaze. The music bars include: 70s Bistro, Conspiracy Garden Café, My Brother’s Mustache, News Desk, Sa Guijo, Unplugged, Capone’s, Pier 1 Mall of Asia, Handle Bar, Mayric’s.

I’ll announce the schedules and the additional bands/singers/bars in weeks to come.

The idea is to spread a culture of peace that is the antithesis of today’s culture of war. As I keep saying, worse than the killings themselves is the ease or blitheness with which GMA and Palparan have been able to justify them—and the indifference or silence with which the public has greeted them. That is the bigger cause for alarm. If we don’t watch out, we will lose our freedom completely, along with our lives, by sheer default. If we have to rebuild the antiwar culture that arose during the Vietnam War ages ago, then let’s do it. If we have to raise the V sign again with our fingers to signify peace, then let’s do it. That is the only real assurance the killings will stop. That is the only lasting assurance the “never again” will truly never happen again.

The culture of peace that we want to build here, of course, is not the one that has to do with burying our heads in the sand, or in the smoke rings of self-induced oblivion. The culture of peace we want to build here is the one that has to do with justice. Justice and peace: Those are not two concepts. Those are two sides of the same coin.

Let life flower, let song soar. Stop the killings!

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