NOW IN Davao City, Mayor Sara Duterte-Carpio has finally issued an Executive Order mandating specific establishments and locations where the city’s safety QR Code must be used by anyone entering its confines.
With the EO of course, it is understood that the violators, either the management of the establishment and facility, or the people who enter the compound, would stand the possibility of getting sanctioned.
We suspect that the mayor is now getting exasperated at the uncomfortable honor of always getting into the Top 5 list of places contributing to the number of new CoViD 19 cases all over the country.
Who is the leader of a constituency who would be pleased if one feels that due to complacency of your people they seem to continue to suffer the vulnerability of a contagious disease? Yet, the mayor seems to have sleepless nights and even working 24 hours daily to find ways to stop the virus’ onslaught.
Imagine the mayor waking up daily being confronted with news reports that the total figure of CoViD cases in her city since the start of the pandemic sometime in March last year now reaches 10,974 (as of January 25, 2021) out of the Mindanao total of 44,782 cases! It surely is not pleasing to the ears.
So, again, would it be surprising if the mayor has to resort to more drastic measures in making the use of QR code to ensure that should anyone be monitored to have acquired the virus, immediately, those who have the possibility of interacting with the person can easily be traced and immediately be warned or isolated should his/her case warrant.
In fact, of late, we know of certain persons who got a text message that they have gone to a particular place where a customer was tested CoViD positive, and they were advised to monitor themselves for any of the symptoms of the infection. And they were effectively traced because of the scanning of their QR code.
So, it is apparent that the mayor’s EO is to further expand the areas or people’s destinations that need to require the scanning of QR code.
That way, monitoring of people who could possibly be infected by the dreaded virus be immediately located and advised properly what to do to avoid spreading further the disease.
Best move by the lady chief executive. And this must not be ignored by everyone in Davao City in order to effectively stem the hike of new cases among the population.
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And why are so many people – or so it seems – from the University of the Philippines campuses all over the country and from other schools identified by the military as recruitment grounds for new members of the Communist Party of the Philippines and eventually its armed elements, the New People’s Army (NPA), raising their strong objection in the government’s abrogating the agreement banning entry of military or police personnel in any of the campuses of the university without permission from the school authorities?
Why are they using it as reason that it is an act that is affront to academic freedom and constitutionally-guaranteed rights? Why does academic freedom include the taking of options to join causes detrimental to the government in addition to one’s right to study whatever course he/she would want to?
Does academic freedom at UP and other schools identified by the military as recruitment grounds include courses or subjects on how to disobey some enabling laws borne by the same Constitution they invoke as source of their dissents?
All their protestations remind us of what a teacher at a UP campus who is an acquaintance of ours told us, and confirmed by some students in that educational institution that it has been a norm in the school that new enrollees are made to read books about progressive movements in the Philippines.
We do not have any idea if this act is being authorized by the school administration or just simply the doing of some individual teachers with progressive minds. But this certainly is one way of starting the conditioning of the minds of new students to the environment that these teachers want them to be in the future.
Remember that incident in a rally some years back in the vicinity of the Department of Social Welfare and Development along Magsaysay Road? Was there not a rally participant who was hauled off by her father after the latter saw her daughter on television live brandishing a placard denouncing certain government action?
The father who came all the way from his province up north was heard as saying “This is not the reason I send you to school and here you are abandoning your classes to harangue the government that is giving you the opportunity for better education.”
In fact we have our personal experiences of knowing how the recruiter and the organization work. When we were in our first year of college shortly before martial law was declared we ran for senator in our school’s Supreme Student government. Then out of the blue came a student, claiming to be transferee from a Manila university.
Without any hesitation he offered us money and other material requirements for the campaign with no string attached. We do not know him and we have no idea why he wants to help us then. So we politely refused telling him we can manage.
During that time demonstrations against school administration and more against the Marcos government were rampant. Then in one of those protest-rallies I saw the man who offered me help climbing the school bus angrily lambasting both the school and the government for almost an endless list of infractions.
He was so passionate in his ways that any unsuspecting listener to his speech would most likely be convinced of the truth to all that he said then.
When martial law was declared he disappeared from the scene. Several months later he was reported killed in an encounter in Negros Occidental. He was the acknowledged commander of a rebel guerrilla front in that province.
We can be certain that the same strategy of recruitment is still being practiced by the present leadership of the decades-old anti-government movement.
