THE WORST IN US

Antonio Contreras

CRISIS situations are said to be opportunities to see the best in humanity. Unfortunately, these are also seen as opportunities for us to reveal our darkest sides and show the world the worst in us. Crisis may enable the kind-hearted and the good Samaritan among us, but it can also push us to rear the ugly side of our instinct toward selfpreservation and reveal the basest form of selfishness and inhumanity. And what can trigger visceral fear strong enough to make human beings forget our humanity is the threat of a deadly virus.

We see this in lessors who evict their lessees, or restaurant owners who deny service to customers — mostly frontline health workers — for fear that they are carriers of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 or SARS-CoV2 that causes the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19). We earlier saw this in the xenophobia toward Asians, who were profiled and labeled as potential carriers of the disease. And now we see this in Caucasian foreigners getting evicted from their hotels when their booked duration of stay expires. Recently, a health worker was violently attacked and his face was doused with a chemical disinfectant.

We saw this in the arrogance of those tasked to enforce quarantine rules. This behavior is so typical of street-level enforcers who are given authority, particularly in times of crisis. Consumed by the adrenaline rush of having the power over others, some of them become petty despots and tyrants in their own limited spheres of authority. We see this in arrogant traffic enforcers and immigration officers, and now we see them in

quarantine checkpoints.

There is certainly a big difference between being assertive and being abusive. While some citizens, indeed, deserve stern enforcement of the rules for being incurably hard-headed, the imposition of a lockdown doesn’t suspend the constitutional rights of individuals against inhuman punishment and treatment. Putting curfew violators in dog cages is patently inhuman, but it is an abomination that one barangay in Laguna has inflicted on some of its citizens. On a lesser scale of inhumanity, but inhuman nevertheless, happens when violators of quarantine rules were asked to sit under the heat of the sun.

While the Covid- 19 pandemic has provided an opportunity for the principle of subsidiarity to operate, where local government units (LGUs) now have the space to define their own set of responses that are more authentic to their conditions, it has also spawned untold cases where uncoordinated initiatives created situations that are uncomfortable at best and inhuman at worst.

Some of the very first casualties of these are those who transport food products. While technically they are supposed to be exempted from the quarantine rules, they fall prey to multiple and different interpretations of rules by LGUs that set up checkpoints along the way. Complaints of inconsistent and often arrogant and abusive behavior of those who man these checkpoints abound. Vegetable traders in Baguio City are now forced to dump their perishable produce rather than go through the difficult process of dealing with multiple nodes of street-level bureaucratic red tape and arrogance.

Residents with valid quarantine passes who wish to buy essentials such as medicines and food in drug stores and supermarkets or transact business in money remittance centers located in neighboring LGUs are being turned away at checkpoints. It is not even clear if they will be allowed to go to hospitals and clinics there. Arguing that he is just protecting his constituents, Mayor Carmelo Lazatin Jr. of Angeles City ordered the closure of a hospital as a punishment for admitting patients possibly infected by Covid-19 who were not residents of his city.

It is understandable for LGU heads to issue lockdowns in their jurisdictions, but it is entirely unclear up to what extent they can exceed that which is provided for by President Rodrigo Duterte. This is important because it becomes a breeding ground for the instinct toward self-preservation turning into painful moments of inhumanity. Take the case of people trapped by the quarantine, mostly workers who were unable to beat the clock and have to walk long distances, some as far as from Manila to Bicol, only to be held at the boundary between Quezon province and Camarines Sur.

The governor of Laguna, Ramil Hernandez, declared a total lockdown of the entire province in an honest attempt to contain the virus. What is, however, problematic is when the good governor started turning back returning residents, mostly blue-collar workers employed outside the province who had just been recently released by their employers. Hernandez was heard saying in a radio interview that he would just send these workers back to their employers, without thinking that these workers have no means of transportation and will thus have to walk back to where they came from to battle it out with another set of LGU rules of exclusion along the way.

In the end, this splendid opportunity for decentralized decision making has turned into unfortunate cracks in our sense of solidarity and

Fearful of the virus, local leaders are now lost deep into a worldview, in which they seem not to care about areas outside their own jurisdiction.

So, we have people left homeless, roaming and walking in the heat of the sun, exhausted and hungry. With weakened immune systems, they become walking petri dishes to culture the coronavirus. But, as things now unfold, they become no longer problems of the lessor, the restaurant owner, the hotel manager, and the governors, mayors or barangay captains who denied them spaces to dwell or enter so long as they are not in the latter’s spaces of jurisdiction and concern.

The more human approach would have been to assist these people, put them in a place that is safe or take them home, where they can undergo selfquarantine. Unfortunately that is not what we are witnessing in these trying and difficult times. What we are witnessing is the worst in us.