To Save A Mockingbird

The last cop I would trust is a cop who makes a career out of arresting prostitutes.

In this country, if you’re a cop and you want to keep your job, you’ll have to turn a blind eye to the crimes of some of your corrupt bosses. You’ll have to risk your life for politicians who plunder the nation’s coffers with impunity. Many times, you’ll have to restrain yourself from arresting the countless extortionists among your colleagues because if you don’t, they’ll just gang up on you and you’ll just end up being another powerless, unarmed loser who’d have to helplessly watch both the civilian and ‘uniformed’ extortionists raid the pockets of honest men. Most of the time, you’ll have to stand among ruthless men who have more blood in their hands than all of the petty criminals detained at your station. And if you can put a harmless prostitute behind bars, if you can punish a woman for job that’s already punishing enough, even though you can deliberately forget about the law when dealing with the more privileged crooks, what kind of person are you?

No I do not think lowly of our policemen. Neither do I judge the cops for not enforcing the law all the time. No matter what the Catholic Church says about the evils of relativism, real people like us often have to choose between the wrong and the worse, and not just right and wrong. If you’re a new cop and you find yourself in the company of colleagues moonlighting as drug pushers, what are you supposed to do? Arrest them? Then let their cohorts kill you afterwards, leaving your family with no breadwinner and no protector? So what happens after your heroic act? You die. Your wife and children die either through starvation or murder. Your corrupt colleagues live on. Society loses one good cop. And a hundred other crimes will happen because you won’t be there to stop them. But if you choose to be prudent, if you stay alive, albeit tainted, you’ll have a chance to prevent some crimes. Though few, there would be people who’d benefit from your enforcement of the law. And after each dangerous day of your life, you’ll still come home to a loving family. In this case, staying alive isn’t exactly the right thing. Tolerating evil is wrong no matter how you look at it. But if you were in that situation, what would you do? Quit and find another job so that you’ll never have to sin at all? Come to think of it, if all good cops refused to sin, if none of them was ever willing to be wrong, there wouldn’t be anyone left to save us when we cry, “Thieves!”

And if I can be kind to the armed cops, so should I be to the powerless prostitutes. The whores are sinners, no doubt. But far from being hardened criminals. What they do for a living is definitely immoral. And like the good cops who can’t always do the right thing, they have their own reasons for doing the wrong thing. Some do it so that their children can live another day. Some do it so that their younger siblings can finish college and will never have to sin as much as they do just to earn a living. While some simply do it so that neither the government nor their families would have to worry about them. If you can swallow all your pride, open yourself to public ridicule, give up your dignity and even risk being raped or mugged in the dark streets of the city almost every night just to support a child or a sibling, what kind of person are you? Evil?

Will the prostitutes burn in hell someday for their sins? Maybe. Do they displease God as they practice their ‘profession’? Perhaps. But even as they continue to sin, even as they go on displeasing the Creator, they still deserve to stay alive. I still want them to stay alive. We all should.

Unfortunately, in this hypocritical world, it is not difficult to find people who’d be happy to wish the prostitutes dead. Just recently, the so called ‘holy men’ of the CBCP (Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines) raised hell over the Department of Health’s distribution of free condoms. I know that those condoms won’t be enough to save all the prostitutes from AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. It’s no secret that condoms are not 100% effective. But every means to save lives must be exhausted, even if that means is not 100% effective and even if those lives belong to the sinful prostitutes. It’s like transplanting an organ. A transplant is never a guarantee that a person with an ailing organ will be saved. But if it can be done, why stop the surgeon from performing it?

Ironically, just last year, a bishop publicly opposed the planned military action against the Abu Sayaff on the grounds that violence would lead to more violence. If bishops can show concern for people who may be killed by bullets, why can’t they do the same for women who might be killed by AIDS?

As children, we were taught good values by our parents and teachers. And in time, we learned to take pride in adhering to our absolute moral standards. But sometimes, that same pride, the one that strengthens our own individual sense of morality, also leads us to distance ourselves from those who fail to be as morally upright as we are. And there, in the vast space we create between them and us, a wall of apathy grows increasingly thicker. It’s about time we end that apathy.

Next time you see a prostitute in the streets of Manila at night, waiting to be picked up by a moneyed customer, ask yourself this: Why is she out there? She can choose to be a thief and just take away your hard-earned possessions. She can choose to be a drug-dealer and earn more money than any of her pimps ever will. Or be a mistress of a corrupt politician and live off her lover’s ill-gotten wealth. But instead, she chooses to stand in that dark corner, praying that the shadows would somehow conceal her face but not her entire body from the passing motorists, hoping that the robbers would deem her so pitifully impoverished that they wouldn’t even bother mugging her, hoping that the next customer would not infect her with AIDS. Why? There is only one answer. She is where she is…

Because she has a conscience.