Another young life nipped in the bud. Another promising career wasted. Atty. Hannah Jay Cesista was her family’s pride, a bright young woman who merited no less than a scholarship from the State (University of the Philippines Cebu), where she finished law last year, took the 2023 Bar Examinations, and passed it handily. And she was pretty, to boot; kind of looked like actress-cosplayer Myrtle Sarrosa (another UP alumna who graduated cum laude). Atty. Hannah was thus a welcome, worthy addition to the legal profession with more than its share of funny-looking females.

But alas, she was killed last 23 February, after barely a year as a lawyer. And no, she wasn’t slain because of what she lawyered for, or in a crime of passion, or as a random victim of a violent crime (which would have been bad enough). She was inveigled by the local communists, brainwashed into joining the moribund NPA’s armed communist revolt against the government — and killed in an encounter with the military. In effect, the communists killed her, their protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

To make a nauseating situation even worse, that perennial ulalo Teddy Casiño justified her pointless death, paying her “the highest tribute” as a supposed revolutionary. Teddy ratiocinates that her joining the armed struggle must have been because Hannah, the lawyer, “realized the limits of a legal struggle,” so she decided to pick up a rifle and start shooting at soldiers.

Sickening doesn’t even begin to describe it. I challenge Teddy to say those exact same words to the grieving parents of Hannah as she lies in state and see what happens to the structure of his face. The hypocrisy of it all is that Teddy does not apply the same standards to his spoiled kids studying in an exclusive school where they are taught such revolutionary skills as baking brownies.

Sir Teddy, since there are limits to a struggle within legal bounds, why not arm your children and let them go to the mountains instead, huh? One of these days, someone might just realize the limits of stamping out communism within legal limits and decide to take other action.

Hannah’s death follows an obnoxious pattern of young, raw recruits dying in armed encounters while more senior cadres scamper away, leaving the new conscripts for target practice. Note the number of young lives taken in this way, young students who drank the Kool-Aid of Communist doctrine: Rendell Caguia, 2014; Wendell Gumban, 2016; Josephine Lapira, 2017; John Carlo Alberto, 2019; Chad Errol Booc and Nikka de la Cruz, 2022. Common denominator: all students, all fooled by the siren song of socialism.

But a family does not even have to suffer death to become a victim of these godless remnants of a failed ideology, abandoned even in the country of its origin. One only has to look at the poor plight of parents whose children were systematically but irretrievably drawn into the dragnet of the Left, their minds poisoned into forgetting everything a Filipino family holds dear — filial duty, respecting and honoring parents, mutual love and support — and joining a movement that ruins their studies, destroys their future, makes them lead lives of filthy poverty, opens them up to sexual abuse and the great possibility of physical harm and even death.

Since these monsters that enlist these impressionable youth do not believe in God, they fail to realize that there is a special place in Hades for them, a distinguished section in Dante’s Inferno.

As the communist movement thrashes about in its death throes, thanks to the NTF-ELCAC (whose programs the present administration hopefully continues), it gets more and more desperate, and therefore more aggressive and reckless, in its recruitment activities and its armed engagements. It will thus come to a point when the New People’s Army’s ranks will be decimated, turning it into a ghost brigade with no membership, a No People’s Army.