Let me begin with a confession: I am weary. Weary of writing about school shootings. Weary of the ritualistic grief, the hashtags, the promises that this time, finally, we shall address the rot. And now, from the Philippines, comes news of another such tragedy: a high school shooting, three dead, the alleged motive a grudge over bullying. A familiar pattern, is it not? The bullied becomes the bully with a firearm. The institution that failed to protect becomes a tomb. The nation that tut-tuts at American gun violence finds itself staring into the same abyss.
We are told that the suspect was a student, that he harboured a resentment over being bullied. I do not doubt it. Bullying in schools is a perennial, almost ritualised cruelty that we have convinced ourselves is a harmless rite of passage. It is not. It is a brutal, corrosive force that can turn the victim into a monster. But here is the uncomfortable truth we dodge: the monster did not act alone. He had access to a firearm. In a society where gun control is lax, where the culture of violence is normalised, where the state of the Philippines has long grappled with insurgencies and extrajudicial killings, the stage is set for such horrors.
Compare this to the Victorian era, when schools were places of rigid discipline, yes, but also of moral instruction. The cane was applied, but the pistol was not. We have swapped one form of brutality for another, and we call it progress. The decline of the family, the atomisation of community, the loss of any shared moral vocabulary: these are the soil in which such acts flourish. The Philippines, like so many nations, is a mirror reflecting back our own decadence.
The response will be predictable. Politicians will offer condolences. There will be calls for more security, more metal detectors, more police. But these are bandages on a haemorrhage. The deeper question is why a young man feels so alienated, so without hope, that he sees violence as his only language. That is a question for a philosopher, not a security consultant. And it is a question we refuse to ask, because the answer might indict us all.
So here is my modest proposal: let us stop pretending that school shootings are a uniquely American problem. They are a modern problem, a symptom of a civilisation in decay. The Philippines is not exceptional; it is merely the latest entry in a grim ledger. Until we address the roots of this decay, we will keep adding names.
And I, for one, am tired of writing the obituaries.