IT’S A SIN TO KILL FERNAN
ANGELES
By Mauro Gia Samonte
I
wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that
courage is a man with a gun in his
hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin
anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but
sometimes you do.
Harper
Lee, “To Kill A Mockingbird”
FERNAN ANGELES is no eagle in the firmament of
Philippine journalists. He is at best just among those little birds less known
for the power of their wings to fly than for their ability to delight listeners
with their songs. And in the case of mockingbirds, those songs are not even
their own but imitations of sounds of other birds and creatures in the
environment. In fact, it is this trait of those little birds for which they are
best remembered.
In
a manner of saying, like mockingbirds, Fernan does not have his own songs to
sing. As his wife, Gemma, puts it, “You seldom see him asking favors for
himself.”
The
fights Fernan fights are not his own but
of little folks who, if left to themselves, would not be able to carry those
fights through for sheer helplessnes.
Like
that fight this writer found himself confronted with middle of April last year.
A landgrabber, backed up by contingents from the Rizal police office and
elements of Barangay Sta. Cruz, Antipolo City, tore up the fence of this
writer’s sizeable lot in this city and crashed into the property in a brazen
act of lawlessness: the landgrabbers had no court order for their entry into
the property.
Together
with his whole family, this writer fought off the attack, getting his face
smashed with a block of concrete, his son stabbed on the head and arrested
together with another son and brought to the Rizal police office for some
concocted charges. Fernan vigorously
worked out an intervention by the Rizal police provincial commander so that the
illegal entry was pushed back promptly, the property fence put back up again,
and this writer’s sons, as Fernan swore, released from police custody before
the day was over.
All
this writer needed that day to avert the attack on his property was a distress
call on the cellphone, and Fernan was there zooming into the picture aboard his
worn-down motorcycle, a most unlikely superhero with his frail frame and
visibly brittle physique which reminds you of Palito of the movie comic fame.
But
bravely rising to the call for succor, he struck this writer as no less super
than Superman masquerading as Clark Kent, news reporter for the Daily Planet,
in combating evils perpetrated upon
society, with this big difference: Superman is fiction, Fernan is real.
As
real as his colleagues carrying on the daily grind of fighting their respective
social monster adversaries.
As
real as the folks he lives among, pulsating with their poverty, feeling their
joys as much as their pains, but ever
sharing their little dreams and many frustrations.
“Always,
it’s for the protection of others that he uses whatever clout he enjoys as a
newspaperman,” says Gemma, recalling that Sunday night when Fernan had to rush
out of their house to have a reload of his cellphone calling credits; he needed
to respond to a call for his assistance.
Quite
some while after Fernan had gone, a barangay tanod rushed to inform Gemma that
Fernan had been shot. She reached the spot on which the shooting happened and
found Fernan already being loaded into an ambulance. She accompanied Fernan in
his rush to the nearest hospital, the
Pasig City General Hospital.
Fernan
was visibly struggling to stay conscious and whisper to Gemma the name of the
guy who shot him. And then he passed out.
Fernan
had a savage beating. Lumps and bruises all over his face. A fractured arm.
Seven .45 shots pumped into his body. One slug got embedded in his spinal
column, threatening to paralyze him for life if not treated correctly.
This
was the picture Gemma presented to this writer that Monday morning he came to
the PCGH. Two policemen were posted at the entrance to the ICU and nobody but
Gemma was allowed to enter it and view Fernan.
This
writer would have wanted to utter something much more than a trite, emotionless
expression of sympathy; Fernan had been a most dear friend. But the minute he
got a forward message on the cellphone
from mutual friend Diego Cagahastian that Fernan had been shot six
times, this writer at once fell into some state of stupor and continued
in it even as in the hospital he came face to face with a grieving Gemma who in
tears told him the story on the incident.
Shock is such a terrible tyrant. It
completely numbs the senses and in this utter numbness there is absolutely nothing you can
operate by which to show your fundamental aspect of being above all else a
human being. Even more than political suppression, therefore, shock is a most
dehumanizing tyranny. It denies you of all senses, particularly the most basic
right to feel rage and grief and vengeance
which otherwise you would want to do all at once for a most inhuman
treatment done upon a friend.
Why would somebody whose one single
fondness is to sing some other people’s woes be meted such savage punishment?
This writer is suddenly reminded of
one of the most quoted passages from “To Kill A Mockingbird”, that Pulitzer
Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee:
“Remember it’s a sin to
kill a mockingbird.” That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a
sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it.
“Your father’s right,”
she said. “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy . . .
but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
Fernan Angeles has suddenly taken up wings to soar as a symbol
of those countless mockingbirds in the Philippine press “…who don’t do one
thing but make music for us to enjoy…but sing their hearts out for us.”
It would be a terrible, terrible sin to kill any member
of the Philippine press.
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