Bruise

"I was once more struck by the truth of the ancient saying: Man's heart is a ditch full of blood. The loved ones who have died throw themselves down on the bank of this ditch to drink the blood and so come to life again; the dearer they are to you, the more of your blood they drink."

- Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba The Greek

Elie Wiesel also used that quote as the epigraph for his short novel, The Accident.

January 27, 2005 marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

When I was in my senior year in Ateneo, I was required to read a great deal about the Holocaust - Hannah Arendt's On Totalitarianism, Bernard Malamud's The Fixer, Elie Wiesel's Night, among others. For one Philosophy class, I had to scour for photographs from that time, to use for a group presentation about Scwart's The Last of the Just.

And there were so many of them, these photographs - of emaciated bodies, lined up on the ground, all traces of humanity gone from their sunken faces, mountains of them, dumped or burned or left to rot, and the gas chambers, its smoke stacks blackening the air with human ash. I looked at these photographs for days, putting them together as a montage mixed with music and narration.

At first, I had to run to the bathroom every hour or so. I felt like I had left my skin, or rather, I had risen up to the surface of my skin, and stayed there, not wanting to go back inside myself. I was afraid of what I would find. Then slowly, as I completed the slideshow, I became numb. Indifferent. The twisted corpses, the gaping mouths, the survivors, more than dead, their hollow eyes and the void that had formed in them, simply became Things to Look At.

That is how Evil begins - the desensitization to suffering.

Even after we'd finished that presentation, I still couldn't sleep. I wasn't depressed, so much as I was doubtful. I doubted other people. How can anyone be capable of such cruelty? I doubted the existence of God, or at the very least, His goodness. What kind of God allows this to happen? Where was He when 1.5 million innocent people died horrible deaths in Auschwitz, where was He when so many more suffered and perished in underground shelters and other death camps? I asked myself these questions. I asked, and I asked, but no philosophical treatise or intellectual paradigm was of any help. Are people Good? And if they're not, what does that make me?

Long after I'd gotten an A- (1.25) in that class, and still long after that, to now, five years after graduating from college, the doubt has gradually faded, replaced once again by my impervious optimism, my faith in God and humanity. It was an abberation, the Holocaust, Yes, it could never happen again. There will be no more Hitlers. We've become too wise, too painfully aware of our predecessors' mistakes, for us to repeat them.

Or have we?

There's always the imminent danger, the shadows darting furtively around corners - Bush and his "war on terror" threatens to break open that casket of Hate, so powerful it could bury us all. And genocide's happening, everywhere, all the time, around the world. It happens here. The bloodbath in Hacienda Luisita. Slow death by lower pay and the rising cost of living. Mothers and fathers jumping off billboards and trains because destitution has driven them to madness. Many of us have become too preoccupied with our own petty little dramas - the palpak boss, the uninterested boy, the confusing love affair, the dying marriage, the scheming aunt, the philandering husband, the crazy family - to notice just how much the rest of the world is in agony.

If we stop being so damn egocentric, if we stop talking, if we listen for once, there's a good chance we could collectively thrive, instead of merely surviving by tearing each other down.

Open your eyes.

Listen.

Let the world drink your blood.