JUST when a great improvement in our city’s fight against the covid pandemic appeared possible, Murphy’s Law has taken and hijacked center stage. That 40s epigram that says, “If anything can go wrong, it will”, still holds true after all, even with today’s supposedly-improved scientific standards and methods at planning and such.
One cannot be but inspired and optimistic even, by what has been previously laid out, as so religiously documented in the news: a lot of impressive modeling, simulations and forecasting done by experts in the field, then segued with the actual application at battling covid by both medical and government institutions. Public cooperation had likewise been exemplary at the outset, so that for a while, we had become some sort of model student in the country’s classroom. Throughout all these, even this die-hard pessimist civilian’s point of view, had been 60-40 hopeful.
However, reality really bites (and hard) because as they say in Spain, “It is not everyday that the matador wins, señor.” At this, the Tagalog slang “Anyare?” or what-the-hell-happened, is apt, and lingering on everyone’s minds. To add, we might as well ask why in Davao lingo, “Batman?”
Meanwhile back at the homestead, be careful with what you have to say because your proverbial slip might be showing. In these days of paranoid and out-of-place political correctness, anything you utter (in disgust or appreciation) may be held against you in a court of social media. At this, if you choose to blame government or any of its institutions, you could be labeled flatly as a yellow political sympathizer or worse, a fist-clenching leftist. Blaming people on the other hand might make you anti-people or anti-poor, anti-church, anti-women or anti-anything. What does it make you if you just blame covid?
Some claim that the quarantine may have proved to be mentally exhausting for people, caused by our natural fear of catching the virus and made more difficult with growing instability in logistics and financial matters. Just to leave it there would however be fruitless, because when we consider the repercussions of these, that are contrary to prescribed protocols, is the risk worth it in the end?
Of course, other factors also come into play. We have become so polarized that our prevailing beliefs on practically anything seem to find their backup source in shared social media memes, which are then collated via self-generated twitter hashtags, and then lastly packaged and accepted as norm.
Just as suddenly, it seems that critical thinking and science might as well be damned, with all this blaming conveniently hurled left and right, and in front and back of the room. In a sense, it has become like a virus itself, breeding along with other negative human traits that have come out of the box during this human crisis.
Look on the bright side, some may say, but where? In the end, with all the excuses that have been said in defending anyone’s going out which may have led to the city’s worsened state, preventing our own demise, or that of others, not to mention our loved ones, is still the best excuse.
