In its essence, it is about public memories and a previously hidden demand not to forget the hideous, monstrous crimes of gang rape and murders by Antonio Sanchez and his henchmen.

Above all, this is the one thing which one immediately realizes, this one thing which the ones who held Sanchez’s likely freedom in their hands had been careless with, this powerful word “memories.”

“After the guilty verdicts were pronounced on the rich and powerful Sanchez and his cohorts, the courts, including the Supreme Court, deemed it was just punishment for Sanchez to live out the rest of his life in jail.

Gross miscalculation then over a powerful public memory of a hideous crime, mistakenly thought of as forgotten by the public, led to the embarrassments of officialdom and then on to the consequent harsh judgment of their incompetence.

Judgment of incompetence from a public outraged at the suspicious circumstances to allow Sanchez, serving seven life sentences, an early release from prison might look like a mockery of a grievous offence. But it is not so.

Officials, including a neophyte senator, could have made it better for themselves if they had said outright Sanchez was ineligible to walk free in the first instance the news broke out.

But, they hee-hawed, unsure of what the law said or what the public thought of the news. They ended up with tattered reputations, never to recover.

They lost utterly by backtracking from their initial positions of “second chances” for an obvious monster and then conclusively prove both their ignorance of a law’s true intentions and their failure to read public memory.

While it can be said that often, and for various reasons, many among us can close our eyes to present-day realities of abuse from officials — but it is not so when it involves the memory of a past event the public had rightly judged as heinous.

Sensing political disaster, obvious partisans of government tried diverting the public backlash by conveniently regaling many with the fact that the law which Sanchez supposedly was to be released under was signed by the previous president.

It did not convince an outraged public. The law clearly excluded the likes of Sanchez.

Neither diverting nor convincing was the view there would have been no Sanchez problem if there was the death penalty. It was a hollow view, as one incensed writer pointed out, because the death penalty was in force when Sanchez committed his crimes, convincingly proving the death penalty was not a deterrent on the commission of heinous crimes.

After the guilty verdicts were pronounced on the rich and powerful Sanchez and his cohorts, the courts, including the Supreme Court, deemed it was just punishment for Sanchez to live out the rest of his life in jail rather than him getting state-sponsored death through lethal injection. The public was barely able to live with that outcome.

All these circumstances came in the wake of public outrage. But what was there which was frightening and painful for a public facing the resurrected nightmare that is Antonio Sanchez? Clearly, the public is unhappy with the latest twist in the Sanchez saga.

Perhaps one reason for public unhappiness is because the hideousness of Sanchez’s crimes flashes up in a dangerous moment of our unhappy land.

Why an unhappy land? Because, as one caustic writer observed of another era, “unhappy is the land that needs heroes. Unhappy because it lacks people who do their duty honestly, responsibly, and with professionalism.”

An unhappy land, therefore, is one where “citizens no longer knew where duty lies, and seek a charismatic leader who tells them what to do.” Or worse, what to think; and that speaks volumes of how ill fares our land.

But that is a deep-seated “perhaps” and, I fear, will elicit violent recriminations from those who feel otherwise since this “perhaps” eventually points out our present crop of leaders have all but utterly betrayed the people’s trust.

There is, however, another “perhaps” which can explain the massive deluge of public outrage. And it has all to do with the fact a generation which had started families when Sanchez committed his crimes are now themselves parents of children who strikingly bear similar ages as the ill-fated Allan Gomez and Eileen Sarmenta.

Being now conscious of themselves as parents, they oftentimes cast worried glances at whatever fate might befall their children. The Sanchez saga suddenly made parents “understand the link between different ages, the way everything that ever lived and ever will live is linked to what is living now.”

The distinct possibility that a nightmare a generation had buried within the stout walls of the Bilibid being resurrected had sudden relevance to any parent’s effort to secure the future safety and welfare of his or her children. And worries about children are powerful emotions and lead nowhere but to rage.

In short, for the present-day parent there is now nothing to prevent another similar nightmare from happening once again since a free Sanchez can only but make other monsters confident that they, too, can get easily away. And that is maddening.

As for the children, they, at first, were clueless about their parents’ anxieties. But the reconstruction of the past brought past events into an excruciating dialogue with a present of unabated violence.

So much so the recollection of the stark brutal term “regalo kay Mayor” or the gruesome facts from autopsies showing “the recovered semen filled a sardine can’’ jolted them out of their seats. Nothing had changed much.

Children, palpably retching at the contemporary accounts of the Sanchez crimes, inevitably came to the realization there were people who lived monstrous lives and that these monsters looked like ordinary people.

And young people reacting badly over past criminal brutalities also shows neither their parents can take it too.