MY TWO CENTS’ – All-out warmongering, and healing the fractured society

Perhaps the most disturbing feeling I get over the last three weeks since the Mamasapano incident is the nagging feeling that many are asking for a war they don’t understand, if they understand war at all. All over social and mainstream media, a sick excitement for war permeates and seeks a presence in the national debate.
I’m no prophet, but there is a sense that we are tugging on the last straws of normalcy as we know it. There is a great distrust in institutions like government, the mainstream media, institutional religion, the peace process, and many forms of organization. We have all been disaggregated and alienated, failing to be genuine to other people around us yet revealing our true selves only to the computer screen and the Facebook page. Other people thus become a bother or a necessary evil, including friends and family. The status page and shoutout is where we really exist. Society is a veritable vacuum for us. Read both mainstream and social media and the level of frustration and cynicism is at a high, such that even the well meaning, thoughtful, and sensitive in real life have become the brash netizen who cares little about the hurt piercing words inflict.
I’m no statistician but I’m sensing that a good number of Filipinos who are vocal about the things secretly yearn for a war that titillates their sense of raw adventurism, despite the lack of information on the history which they have not bothered to study, and the consequences of which they do not understand, as they are not affected.
What this does reveal is growing alienation from society and reality. Marx and critical theorists like Theodore Adorno wrote and thought of it extensively. Alienation has been the meat of 20th century sociology and the study of group behavioral thought. You know you are so alienated when it is so convenient for you to call for a war that you know you will never feel. Woe to those on the border and the frontline who will face the consequence of your call. The alienated feel separated from the rest and simply don’t care what happens to others as a result of their actions. This is the most disturbing and worrying, when the frustration at a broken society pushes you to destroy it even further.
What we need, more than ever, is a return to the sense of oneness with others. We need a leader that can help bring back faith in institutions, in the need to be part of groups, to restore the dignity of families, where empathy, a sense of oneness, a feeling of nation, begin and exist.
Come 2016, this is the deep challenge that any prospective leader will have to tackle. It may take generations to undo, so the leaders we choose will have to plant the right seeds and set into motion the patterns of cultivation meant to regrow this fractured society.