The Passion of The Crime

TO DIE FOR   But, of course, who would blame her?

I was watching the evening news the other day and there was this one news item that made me cringe: a wife killed her husband with a gun, point blank, inside a mall. Although the crime is not something that would alter the exchange rate into another increase, but the incident was indicative of the kind of angst people are getting nowadays, most of us are so desperate we failed to see the consequences of our act before coming into fruition.

Crimes of passion are hard to contain. When someone is betrayed, hellish fire will eventually consume the whole nine yards until everything is in ruins. After shooting her helpless husband, the distraught wife tried to commit suicide by pointing the gun at her. One of the mall guards, however, prevented her from doing it, but unfortunately for the guard, she somehow pulled the trigger at the direction of her intruder, killing the guard in return. She was immediately apprehended, but the guard and her husband died, leaving her to regret inside a lonely cell probably for the rest of her life. She had succumbed to her feelings; to her passion of getting even, but it only lead her to a life behind bars.

She looked so determined and focused before she unloaded her unbridled passion that she somehow tricked the mall guards into believing she wasn’t carrying anything deadly at all, like a gun perhaps. Malls are usually protected with metal detectors, but how her gun passed through it is still a question most of us mall addicts would not even dare entertain, considering that it happened at SM, a populated mall at that. But because she was so disgruntled and angry with her allegedly philandering husband, who is now living with another woman (and very much pregnant), any hurdle, like a mall security is just a paltry thing compared to the jilting her husband has imposed upon her. Sometimes it is so hard to fathom the extent of the hurt, but you could always see the depth of its anguish when instances like this get into the news.

Somehow we too have had our fair share of betrayals every now and then, but pampering it with negativity and nursing it with some criminal intent is another story. Of course, we get angry when it happens (everybody does), when things don’t turn out the way we wanted it to be. And during these moments, however, passions would run high, and we always have that sinking feeling that we are actually against the world. That was the feel, more or less, when that woman emptied the shell of her gun into her husband’s head, she simply could not reconcile and accept herself when her husband called it quits. And when the hatchet goes down, no amount of casing could probably contain the emotion involved in the parting.

But even if you don’t experience that type of jilting she had had with her husband, sometimes you are still betrayed for its own sake. Even if you live a blameless life, or even if you cross the street after following these traffic rules, somehow you are still confronted with that sort of betrayal as you go along your daily routine. Many times you let out a spurious dissatisfaction on yourself that your day is not enough, that there are still so many chores to be done, that you simply can’t keep up with time, the reason why even on a Sunday morning you just can’t help but report to your office and burn those candles. And it takes a whole lot of passion to do just that; it would be quite meaningless at times without it.

Maybe we should remain passionate in everything we do, regardless if that same passion is considered foolish for everybody to see. I think we should be passionate with our relationships while it lasted and not after it. It is only when you get passionate after every relationship that you begin to form a negative idea about it, which sometimes develops into something criminal. She became a criminal because she somehow forced her passion abruptly instead of letting it grow from the moment the relationship started. It was clear from the very beginning that they did not nurture that passion when it was essentially called for in their happier days, they only let it flow when the barricades had crumbled, but by then the floodgates of hate and regret had already consumed them.

The same is true with our daily bread. We are more than willing to participate in any stupid practices because somehow we are not passionate about the things around us, our relationship with one another, and even with our lives. We deliberately extend our stay in that office, under the guise of “passionate” work, so we could steal, kill and eventually fool our constituents. And when all hell broke loose, we immediately invoked our right to self-incrimination so we could continue committing those crimes in aid of legislation. And most of us, people in the streets, or even to that hurting couple, are quite comfortable with that because we’re so desperate we somehow failed to see the consequences of their act, and our own as well, before coming into fruition.

Crimes had been committed everyday in this country, whether from a passionate affair or from those who have a passion for it. Our desperation has reached some new heights of anger in that we are already willing to die out of the strains and sentimentality of a failed relationship. But, of course, who would blame her? If I were in her shoes, I could have done the same stupid thing also, probably worse. A wife killing her husband is not only disturbing, if you are gender sensitive, it somehow breaks laws that would inevitably shatter whatever dignity and sanity left in us. Needless to say, it takes great passion to point a gun at your husband in a mall full of people, because it would be too empty to point it otherwise.