We are spectators to death

In 2000, the Payatas landslide killed hundreds of its slum residents so quickly that nearby funeral parlors needed a quick and cheap way to prepare the corpses for burial. The dead, mostly children who were scavengers at the garbage dump site, were treated with formaldehyde and wrapped from head to foot with masking tape. Over and over, the news coverage showed the images of children’s taped bodies and faces, lying in their caskets wearing their Sunday best, a small bump of a nose or chin visible from outside the wrinkled layers of tape, their mothers weeping and laying hands on their tiny mummies.

In one video of the disaster’s recovery efforts, a bloated corpse that was being lifted by a bulldozer from a garbage heap suddenly split in two, spilling its intestines and other organs in a tangled mess that connected the top and bottom parts of that person’s body like two cans and a string. The backhoe continued its work using its toothy jaws to shovel the body and adjacent smoky garbage into a pile to be dealt with later. 

A roll call of disasters

A few years before that, images showed the charred and open-mouthed corpses of the teenage victims of the 1996 Ozone Disco fire piled on top of one another inside the front doors that trapped the panicked crowd that night. Underneath they found dozens of cellphones and pagers, some still on and ringing in a sad technological version of hope. 

The 8,000 dead in the 1991 Ormoc flash floods are immortalized online in photos of recumbent bodies in crawling positions (Caution: graphic images). Same thing for the 4,000 dead of the MV Doña Paz that collided with an oil tanker right before Christmas in 1987 and sent holiday-bound families on board the overloaded ship to their watery graves. The bodies were not only bloated but also scalded, as the burning oil from the tanker caused the seawater to boil the passengers who managed to jump overboard to escape.

The front page of a major daily showed a blood-soaked and dismembered child being carried by a screaming man the day after an LRT train was bombed by militants on Rizal Day in 2000, killing 22. In the full-page colored cover photo, the girl’s legs were ripped off around her knees, and blood dripped from the mangled human meat only seen during wars and firecracker accidents. In the news article, an interview of the deceased’s uncle revealed that when the bomb went off, the girl’s body shot up into the air and slammed on the train’s ceiling before it landed on the floor in pieces.

Those are just a few of my media coverage memories of disasters for the past 25 years. A person who’s been around even for the past 10 years would agree that one image is already too much. Too much that when we see the recent footage of bodies scattered on the streets of Tacloban, we are appalled by how gruesome it is, but have to dissociate ourselves for our own peace of mind. And yet we don’t stop looking. We leaf through pages, click on images, wanting more of the tragedy to unfold before our eyes. But we stay seated.

The skill of dissociation

As an adolescent discovering early internet scum in the 90s, my friends and I discovered a video of a man whose throat was being severed using an army knife. It became a ridiculous and heartless badge of courage for each of us to sit through the video while the man’s neck was being stabbed and as he choked on his own blood that gurgled out of his mouth. Afterwards, his head would be pulled off from his body by his hair while the knife cut the surrounding tissue around his neck. We thought it proved how well we dissociated images from reality, as we recited our mantras of rationalizations: The man was Caucasian, so none of us knew him. The black and white film must be very old. He must have been a bad guy. And so on.

We don’t have to be told that dead bodies were once mothers, sons, and siblings with loved ones who might still be looking for them. We must gloss over their faces and their dying positions so we don’t have to think of how exactly they took their last breaths. For those on the ground during those moments, there isn’t time for that either. The survivors of Yolanda don’t have the time or luxury to mourn. In catastrophes, bodies are merely structures to be cleared and buried so the living can safely move on.

A severity scale

I wonder sometimes if the graphic portrayal of disaster casualties in media numbs us and puts tragedies on a severity scale depending on how horrible its death toll and circulated images are. How often do we say it’s just another typhoon if only 200 died?

I wonder too if the ability to sit through footage of calamity after calamity is any different from watching an execution video over and over. With repeated exposure to death and destruction, and no great effect on the viewer other than a shaking of the head or some sucking of the teeth, are we reciting our mantras and rationalizing these events? Commonly heard statements of deflection include: Why didn’t they evacuate when told? At least they have two kids left even if they lost 4. Why didn’t they store food?  Looters are evil and I would die first before I steal! “But you did not die, right?” will be the quote of the year.

In reality, it makes no difference whether the loss is one life, or 235, or 5,000. Loss is loss for those involved whether its images are delivered to the rest of us or not. For a spectator guilty of being desensitized to death, I have some gall to talk about situations I’m not part of, having never set foot in a war zone or in the aftermath of a disaster. Like most people, I make my uninformed observations from the television or computer screen, being an armchair critic of an entire event, forgetting about the individual experience of loss.

But as I write this as an attempt to recall the calamities I’ve lived through, I’ve found there aren’t many who remember Payatas, Ozone, Dona Paz, or even the recent Sendong as more than events of the past. I can’t help but think that in a year or two, this past ungodly storm will end up being just a Wikipedia page called Typhoon Haiyan, and like all the others, end up as a reminder of how nothing has changed and no meaningful resolutions have been made to prevent such a catastrophe. In a few years, we’ll look at its familiar images of death and know that the lives of its spectators have gone on. This includes our own.

“Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.” ― Aldous Huxley

– Rappler.com

Shakira Andrea Sison is a Palanca Award-winning essayist. She currently works in finance and spends her non-working hours fighting her own storms in subway trains. She is a veterinarian by education and was managing a retail corporation in Manila before relocating to New York in 2002. Follow her on Twitter: @shakirasison and on Facebook.com/sisonshakira.