Exhausted, we all need a break
THE current health and economic crisis brought about by the Covid19 pandemic has pushed our endurance meters to the limit.
The poor are hungry. The rich are losing money. Health care workers are left exhausted from attending to the needs of the sick. In five months of limited activity owing to governmentand self- imposed restrictions, everyone seems to feel the pressure of deprivation of whatever kind, one way or the other.
It also appears that our duty- bearers have been deprived of a much- needed capacity to understand the extent of people’s woes.
The other day, Aug. 1, 2020, medical practitioners asked President Rodrigo Duterte to reimpose strict containment protocols for Metro Manila for another two weeks. Their context was that the resurgence of Covid-19 infections has overburdened the capacity of health facilities. There was an urgent need for slowing down the number of hospital admissions so that “health workers can have time to recover from exhaustion.”
Maricar Limpin, the vice president of the Philippine College of Physicians ( PCP), also said a two- week “time- out” would allow authorities to come up with a comprehensive plan.
Asked for her comment on the request to revert Metro Manila to enhanced community quarantine or ECQ, Sen. Cynthia Villar said in a radio interview, “Hindi na siguro, oo, pagbutihin nila trabaho nila, oo. Hindi pwedeng isara ang ekonomiya kasi kung hindi naman mamatay sa Covid, mamatay naman sa gutom ang mga tao.”
Social media burst with nasty comments about how insensitive Villar can be in responding to the plight of health care workers. I myself thought she could be understood better if one empathizes with her context, which is not about people getting hungry but of her family’s businesses being hard- pressed to pay the debt papers they issued if the economy continues to plummet. At stake was not so much the survival of one’s poor constituents as it must be about risks to his or her reputation.
The next day Villar felt obliged to clarify what she said, explaining this time that her “remark was not aimed at medical professionals fighting the coronavirus pandemic, but at the government, particularly the Department of Health ( DoH).”
President Duterte himself appears unable to fully appreciate what the medical workers were up to. In a recorded broadcast released on Sunday, Aug. 2, 2020, he was his usual self — meandering too far from issues people expect him to focus on.
Although he acknowledged their significant contributions to help check the pandemic, and yielded to a compromise agreement with respect to the reimposition of strict quarantine restrictions in selected areas, Duterte did this grudgingly, with matching bluster and threats — the usual shebang that comes out of these nocturnal briefings.
In a “spectacle” that brings back Sen. Panfilo Lacson’s “Where is the connection” tweet, the President urged the nurses to shift to a military career where they can be better compensated, and dared the medical practitioners to stage a revolution, if this was in their agenda.
The PCP quickly issued a statement the following day, August 3, saying “they had no intention to threaten Duterte and his government with a ‘revolution’ in airing their grievances publicly.”
That they aired their grievances publicly was another low blow insofar as the President was concerned. “… there is no need for you... telling us what to do publicly. You could have just [ written] us a letter.”
Palace spokesman Harry Roque Jr. added that “the letter of the PCP was released to the public and to the media even before it was sent to the President,” as if private individuals, the taxpayers, their bosses, are under obligation to follow the official chain of command.
Nonetheless, the men and women in white bothered themselves to explain that they had to do it publicly because previous requests made privately ( that is, without the “spectacle” of publicity) were also ignored privately, or something to that effect.
On the matter of the imagined call for a revolution, Roque explained that this was prompted by “the successive criticisms against the government by opposition figures Vice President Maria Leonor “Leni” Robredo and Sen. Franklin Drilon and the release of the Filipino version of the Les Miserables song “Do you Hear the People Sing?”
He noted that “the Filipino version titled ‘‘ Di Niyo ba Naririnig’ was released as a protest song hours before Duterte’s fifth State of the Nation Address last week.”
The story of Les Miserables revolves around a character, Jean Valjean, who was hunted down by the police for stealing loaves of bread that he gave to two starving children. Historical accounts say Victor Hugo, the author, ignited the French Revolution with this novel in the same way that Jose Rizal did for the Filipino uprising against Spain with his Noli Me Tangere.
That said, I still am not sure if the backdrop fits into the current context of discontent. My own interpretation is that “‘ Di Niyo Ba Naririnig” can be addressed not only to the present government. It indicts traditional politics as the personification of the ogre that never dies.
We have had chances to make genuine change happen. But somehow basic flaws in our culture and political systems kept us from progressing.
Except perhaps for those of Corazon Aquino and Fidel Ramos, all governments in recent memory have been charged, at varying degrees of public contempt, for dysfunctional leadership. The Duterte government appears to follow this unsavory streak; five months of Covid- 19 just confirmed it.
Twenty-two years. Four presidents. One crisis after another. We all need a break.