Resist at all cost
It was half-past one on the morning of Sunday, Sept. 5. No wind blew on that rather dark and starless night, not a drop in the heat index that had remained consistent throughout the day.
Social media did little to ease the onerous clime that had turned most newsfeeds into obituaries. How many times did ambulance sirens roused us from our world-denying sleep? How many condolences should one offer until enough is enough?
Losing a loved one to the virus is nothing compared to losing a loved one to our own overwhelming sense of helplessness. It is the one overarching tragedy of our time. Covid-19 and all its variants have severed us from one another.
So much so that the smallest act of kindness, like a simple greeting from a stranger over Zoom or Messenger, or a few hundred pesos arriving in GCash just in the nick of time from someone you hardly even met, has served as a lifeline for many of us.
Today, a child grows up thinking early of death. They grapple at answering why father or mother, brother and sister, failed to return home after a trip to the hospital. Some kids may be getting the feeling that they are loved less because of the distance the pandemic has imposed between parents and child.
We cushion the blow of the contagion by trying to live the kind of life we knew prior to the arrival of the virus. The easiest way out is to pretend it didn’t happen, that life as we knew it still possible. Not only that, but whatever it is that has been turning our world into something well-nigh unlivable may really just be a figment of our imagination, the stuff of dystopian fiction.
Politics, infighting, and corruption within the halls of power have put us on the receiving end of an ongoing dearth in vaccines. Fearing for their lives, many took on other pharmaceutical alternatives, no matter how preposterous, like parasitic medicine used largely for livestock, just to guarantee the arrival of a new day.
But at the back of our minds, we know we’ve crossed the point of no return. The virus is here to stay. Anxious for our own future and that of our children, we begin to grapple at straws. The night seems endless. We lose sleep for the grimmest of reasons, and stop at the brink of closing our eyes because tomorrow might never come.
That humid morning of Sept. 5, I came across a line from my favorite author, James Baldwin. He said in his book, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings:
But I doubt that there could ever have been a time which demanded more of the writer than do these present days […] The writer trapped among a speechless people is in danger of becoming speechless himself […] What the times demand, and in an unprecedented fashion, is that one be — not seem — outrageous, independent, anarchical […] That one resist at whatever cost the fearful pressures placed on one to lie about one’s own experience. For in the same way that the writer scarcely ever had a more uneasy time, he has never been needed more.
Allow me, therefore, to indulge in a bit of anarchical writing.
How is it that those tasked to deal with the pandemic in this benighted country make no qualms about confusing the public with their pronouncements?
Take for instance the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF). It has recently made a pronouncement over radio that it would be imposing “granular lockdowns,” beginning Sept. 8, in places that have high infection rates.
A granular lockdown, by definition, is the imposition of varying levels of restrictions in a community narrowed down to small “hotspots”. These smaller-in-scope yet equally difficult lockdowns are the IATF’s solution to the growing infection rates in the country.
Anyone with half a brain would know that the implementation would only wreak havoc on a community already whirling in hunger and disease. Let’s not even discuss the absurdity of locking down a particular stretch of street or a row of houses against a virus that is largely airborne.
Yet, in the same breath, the same IATF recently lifted the Philippines’ travel ban on India, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, Nepal and other countries starting Sept 6. Thailand has a little over 15,000 daily cases while India pegs a way higher figure at 47,000 per day.
The Philippines itself logs a little over 20,000 cases daily, more than enough to put locals and foreigners in dire risk of contracting the virus. Even if infection rates are way lower than real-time figures, the Delta variant’s rate of infection hardly bodes well for anyone who gets in contact with it.
Somewhere between China’s no-tolerance campaign to restrict its borders from the influx of foreign tourists, to the Philippines’ ludicrous opening of its doors, lies a people engulfed in the quagmire of uncertainty and disbelief.
Does the IATF really know what it’s doing, or is it another one of those “smokescreens” designed to derail the public from criticizing the government for its botched pandemic response?
Or, are we simply looking at officials whose absurdity and appalling lack of common sense (to say nothing of medical savvy) has made a travesty of the pandemic response?
Could it be that all we have witnessed since Covid-19 arrived is simply stupidity? Your guess is as good as mine.
There’s a gravity to what I’m trying to say should my suspicions prove true in the end: that stupidity may be responsible for the untold throng who have tested positive since the first lockdown in mid-March 2020.
Stupidity is fueling the threat against the species’ survival, as Noam Chomsky once said. This leads to a level of incompetence, one weighed down by greed, where the survival of the few trumps the survival of the many.
How can this even be acceptable at a time like this?
Yet, many of my countrymen turn a blind eye and go on with their lives like nothing has happened. They fail to grasp that the virus is no respecter of persons, that endangering the public means endangering even themselves.
The task force, in fact, have failed to recognize that if they only kicked off the campaign against Covid-19 with extensive contact tracing, massive vaccination effort, and proper expenditure to support our medical frontliners, the troubles we are facing now may have been alleviated to a certain extent.
The controversy that’s brewing in relation to Pharmally, should it be proven true, attests to our deepest fears: that this regime has turned the pandemic into a multibillion-peso business transaction which benefits only a privileged few.
I fear that the task force will continue to act out their ludicrous scripts without the slightest concern for what might happen in the aftermath. Forget the conspiracy theory that this regime is intelligent enough and smart enough to concoct a smokescreen to cover their tracks.
Stupidity is a variant of political malaise, a condition that puts more premium on navel-gazing than the job at hand. If you’ve noticed, these officials oftentimes seem to be completely out of touch with reality. Friedrich Nietzsche said it best: To forget one’s purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.
Never underestimate the power of stupidity to lay waste everything in its path. It is so endemic to the human condition, especially those in power, that most, if not all their decisions, actions, and transactions, can be laid at stupidity’s feet.
Stupidity in people, on the other hand, is the first and last bastion of the powerful to get their way. Fanaticism, although they will not admit to it, is their means of grasping at straws.
It is my proposition that stupidity is killing us. And no matter how we try to convince powerful entities that there are better ways to approach the pandemic, it is greed, besides stupidity, that renders them doubly blind.
If we are to see the day of the virus’ demise, we must resist the temptation to lie to ourselves at all cost.
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