You’ll never know how ear-shattering a scream is until you’re near someone who’s begging for mercy.

You’ve heard it in movies. When a character pulls the trigger of a gun and—bang. It echoes loudly inside the cinema room. Some people flinch in shock, while others whistle at how cool the character is. It can also be from the actor’s voice—how you can hear it rasp as he strains his neck not to break. He screams—tears streaming down his face—and the sound pierces deep. A deafening screech goes through you, forcing your mind to cling desperately to the edge of sound.

But there’s one “sound” that is hard to miss.

And that is complete, utter silence.

You sit on the reclined, velvet chair, suddenly so aware of the sweat accumulating in your palms. The bottle you’re holding crumples in your grasp. You hate it, don’t you? When silence lingers, when nothing is progressing, when there is nothing.

You know that “sound.” How deafening silence is.

Clap.

Yet, if there’s silence, there’s also something worse.

Clap.

You’ve heard it a thousand times. In fact, you’ve heard it recently.

Clap.

You’ve heard it from someone’s hands.

Clap.

You’ve heard it from someone’s mouth.

Clap.

You’ve heard it from a group of people who gather in a room, listening to a man talk about so-called progress. About how he supposedly rescued the rural poor, tossing out numbers like confetti. "Dalawang kalahati milyong—" "Tatlong po’t—" "Mahigit isang—"

The claps echoed in the hall. The people continue to shout outside. Stop this. Hear us. Why is it so difficult for you to use your ears when you’re not deaf? You know the problem. It’s not about money. It’s not about short-term relief. How odd. Were applauses louder than the scream of a plea? Was ignoring the systemic rot so jarring it earned him an applause?

Clap. Clap. Clap.

It is jarring.

How are empty promises so loud? Why are cries for help so quiet? Why is it that when someone speaks in front, you hear nothing but exactly what it is—nothing?

He stands at the podium and boasts of the PAFFF—shouting numbers to prove he cushioned the blow for millions of farmers and fisherfolk with pocket-change doles. A miserable band-aid for an amputation. And the hall erupts. Clap. They celebrate a government that hands out temporary survival envelopes with one hand, while signing away the future with the other.

This isn’t a movie, by the way.

That’s someone’s livelihood at stake.

Because right outside that air-conditioned theater, while their clap echoes in the hall, the blueprint for the Pax Silica industrial hub looms over Tarlac—a massive 1,620-hectare artificial intelligence and tech corridor carved straight out of the earth. They trade ancestral lands, food security, and local livelihoods for foreign tech supply chains and empty corporate buzzwords, all while pretending that a meager, one-time cash assistance can reverse the devastation.

Why do they steal from those who are keeping this nation alive? How can they put nature on the line for abstract promises of economic growth? You know that’s a lie. It is an insult to the intelligence of those who cherish the forests that hold back floods, the lands that farmers harvest with calloused hands, and the seas that feed families every single night.

You want to scream, right?

Where would that go though? No one would clap for that.

So, you listen to them screaming again.

Those kinds of ear-shattering sounds are something you’d expect out of an action movie, of a heartbreaking scene of two lovers.

In fact, this whole nonsense can come straight out of a dystopian novel, adapted into a movie, and your mouth will drop on the carpeted floors—bizarre, you’d think. Ridiculous. No one will clap for this.

And so, they clap again.

You know now—how quiet a noise is, and how loud silence can be.

Clap.

You heard it from someone who did not take any action at all.

Clap.

From the people who use their hands to applaud nothingness instead of lending a hand.

The type that takes the livelihoods of people—those with deaf ears and sickening pride.

Clap.

And you, who listen, bear the pain of listening to the suffering of the people who only wish to survive another day—drowned out by a room full of people too busy clapping for their own decay.

Clap.

The Frontman