Beware, too, the 'ber' months

MANY older Filipinos have a morbid fear of the month of August, which they associate with misfortune, calamity and death. The late Nick Joaquin weaved this dread of August into his novel "Cave and Shadows," calling it "the month of amok, when tempers cracked or crazed," the collective lunacy attributed to a different kind of heat that comes with the rains. "If you feel broiled in March," Joaquin wrote, "you feel boiled in August." It is the month when torrential rains fall on the hot earth, sending out miasmas or vapors believed to cause illness, physical and mental.

Well, not just illnesses. I remembered Joaquin's novel while visiting an elderly patient recovering from a hip fracture, an injury she felt was inevitable since it was, after all, August. She and many lolos and lolas could rattle off "proof" that August was a bad, malas, month, recounting particular Augusts when nature unleashed its wrath in typhoons and earthquakes. Then they'd move on to man-made cataclysmic events, the most often cited examples being the Plaza Miranda bombing on August 21, 1971 and on that same date 12 years later, the Ninoy Aquino assassination.

August 2004

I will admit I carry a certain dread of August, too. It doesn't help being Chinese-Filipino because August also often overlaps with the seventh Chinese lunar month, a time when hungry ghosts are believed to roam the earth looking for victims to bring back into the underworld.

I don't believe in malas or hungry ghosts, but culture is so powerful that each time something happens in August, my gut reaction is to go, "It's that month again." August 2004 has been particularly difficult, with a succession of typhoons--and bloodthirsty humans. It was a month of pessimism, of dire predictions about the Philippine economy collapsing.
It was also a month of international terrorism: 12 Nepali hostages executed in Iraq; the usual suicide bombings in Israel; and, to cap the month, the carnage in the schoolhouse in Beslan, Russia, perpetrated by Chechen separatists, resulting in the death of almost 400 hostages, half of them children.

It's tempting to attribute these events to the quirks of August weather. Yet, August isn't necessarily a month of miasmas in the Middle East or in Russia. August's ominous aura is a Filipino label, read into the month because of our specific meteorology.

Miasmas aside, we could shake our heads and go, "Muslim fanaticism." Now, that kind of interpretation doesn't represent too much of progress from the "bad August" mind-set. It's too simplistic, yet it's this "fanaticism" explanation which we find in most of the media reports around these terrorist attacks.

Evil in men's hearts

Let me be clear here: Terrorism is terrorism and can never be justified. Beslan was even more repulsive because children were taken hostage and slaughtered. Yet, when you think about it, the targeting of children was deliberate. In terrorism, the ultimate goal is not the killing; rather, the killing is to instill fear and dread among those left behind, and to agitate communities to wage war against each other. The terrorists knew where it would hurt most.

The evil in these terrorists' hearts comes through even more clearly in the way they chose to attack on the first day of classes. The terrorists probably knew all too well the anticipation that children, and parents, have with each new school year. With this attack on Beslan, the first day of school takes on new meanings. Never again will schools be thought of as safe havens.

Yet we know, deep down, it isn't August's miasmas or "fanaticism" that drive men and women to assassinate, to wire school gymnasiums and basketball hoops with explosives.

Beslan was a reminder of an often forgotten civil conflict in Russia. There just isn't enough space here to give all the details but it's important to remember that some 130,000 Chechen civilians have died in the last decade as Russia tries to suppress the independence movement there. Some of those terrorists in Beslan were schoolchildren, too, or parents of schoolchildren at the height of the conflict, and I have no doubts that the deaths of their own loved ones had so warped their souls.

My point is that we will continue to see more Beslans and that it will not help to explain these incidents away as the result of "fanaticism," to be quelled with more force and violence.

It doesn't help that local and global mass media continue to concentrate on the sensational sound and video bites, transforming the bloody debacle into an action flick. Only once, and it lasted about three minutes, did I catch an interview with a sharp Russian analyst, on BBC, explaining the missing pieces to the Beslan carnage: the corruption of Russian police that has allowed repeated terrorist attacks and the neglect of Chechnya, with unemployment running as high as 80 percent, providing a ready reserve of conscripts for the terrorists' ranks. There are lessons for Filipinos, too, in Chechnya.

Whose ghosts, whose miasmas?

All that said, I actually feel it might be good to retain this idea of a dangerous August, at least symbolically. It is important to remember the events of August, maybe even with its metaphors of miasmas and earthquakes, asking about the events that led to the Beslan carnage in the same way we try to understand the links between the Plaza Miranda bombing in August 1971 and Ninoy Aquino's assassination 12 Augusts later.

If we can strip August of the arcane and the occult, it might make us more discerning, too, about the "ber" months. We're relieved when September arrives, almost as if it and the succeeding "ber" months will bring an end to August's misery.

Again, I'll say it's healthy to look forward to the "ber" months, together with an anticipation of Christmas festivities and hopes for a new better year. But those hopes need to be tempered. Let's not forget that sometimes, September brings its share of grief as well. There is, after all, Sept. 21, 1972 and martial law, an act of terror, too. And then, too, there's 9/11, the third anniversary of which we remember tomorrow.

The "ber" months, or for that matter all the other months, are not without their dangers, but remembering the acts of terror should not mean making ourselves hostages to evil, forcing us to live in a state of siege or allowing ourselves to be drawn into murderous frenzies of vengeance. Taking a cue from America's Bush, Russia now talks about "preemptive" strikes against its enemies, anywhere in the world. All this should please Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders; it's proof that their tactics do work.

Alas, we create our own hungry ghosts and lethal miasmas.