A lot of people won’t be having much of a Christmas this year. For tens of thousands, broken candles and long-overdue donations will be their Noche Buena. Amid the ruins, there will be little left to help them sort through the fragments of their lives; nothing left to anchor the past to hopes of a better future. There will be prayers, of course. Prayers that will drift up to an austere heaven - each bead representing a lost loved one - before they descend, unheard, on the banquets of kings. 

In Manila these same kings have banned hammers from malls (but not profiteering or tax evasion by the owner of those malls) - and to make way for the malls, the families of bus drivers, who earn less than minimum wage for a 19-hour work day, will see their homes demolished. Demolished, like farmers’ attempts to plant their own crops in Hacienda Luisita this week, which added another page to the chronicle of landlessness and dispossession that are facts of life for three out of every five Filipinos for whom a decent life exists only in ABS-CBN teleseryes. Demolished, like the communities of Eastern Visayas.

Thinking through these scenes one is reminded, again and again, of just how much the tyranny we live under - which masquerades as democracy - values life. That is, not at all. 

Indeed, resistance to injustice is met with impunity and truth is silenced through murder (of no less than four journalists and an indigenous rights activist in a little over two weeks… and, five days before Christmas, a city mayor and an 18-month old child). 

Worst of all, at the end of the day, we will be expected to believe this is all normal, and that we can go on with our lives guilt-free. Perhaps we will recognise the horror for what it is only when it is too late.

At the heart of the insanity is a society where, as Mandela noted, private property takes precedence over human rights, and where peace and order for the minority are more important than justice for the majority. Which explains why the President and his entourage rushed to SM North a few days ago to personally oversee the thorny issue of the Martilyo gang, when much bigger thieves have yet to see justice, and when so many other issues ought to occupy the head of state. Ultimately, of course, jewelry and personal reputations are more important than human lives.

Ours is a tyranny all the more terrifying because it is left unsaid, masked by the rhetoric of reform and promises of better standards of living for all - within a system that invests more in arms and profits than education and health care. 

The question we should be asking ourselves is not why this is all happening - we know why - but how could we have believed otherwise? How could we have stayed so silent and so stupid (or rather, so afraid) for so long? Are the lies simply worth believing in, or is the truth too painful to contemplate, or are the solutions too difficult to bear? As Christmas approaches, how do we reconcile our faith with the reality of a world where the cries of the child who slept in the manger are the same cries we hear every day?

And above all, what is to be done?

For tens of thousands, rage and disappointment will be their Noche Buena. But amid the ruins, there will also be resistance. And hope. 

#Tindog