YOU are walking alone in the dark. You are being followed by someone you do not know. You are scared. You fear for your life and run.
After a long pursuit, you soon get tired. You are afraid you might not get home on time safe and sound.
Scare, fear, and afraid -- verb, noun, and adjective -- English words that are becoming meaningful to me in these days of the pandemic.
This morning, I found myself looking at how these words are used grammatically and in science.
In our lead paragraph, I used the word scare as something that a perpetrator inflicts on a victim, while fear is a word that inspires a reaction. The perpetrator is frightening so you run.
Being afraid can also be used in relation to a feeling not so much of pure fear as of worry.
The word afraid was used here to denote worry, an ongoing process, unlike fear which is a state of being.
The word afraid can be used in many ways like when you are preoccupied. You may be afraid something will happen. Still the basis stems from fear.
In biology, fear is a deeply wired reaction to protect organisms against a perceived threat to their existence. Fear may be as simple as a cringe or provoked in an animal. Among humans, the feeling is as complex as existential anxiety.
American Author William Faulkner teaches us a good lesson about fear with this quote attributed to him. "Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid.
The words scare and fear alerts a predator's potential victim to a danger. Being afraid is something else. When it leads to paralysis, the victim is finished, fallen from the bridge.
The Covid-19 pandemic has taken all by surprise. Eventually it disrupted our daily schedules and way of life.
It affected livelihoods, businesses, governance, and continues to inspire a host of other threats to peace and order and well-being.
Imagine angry and hungry people marching in total disregard of the disease to demand assistance from the government.
That actually happened in Quezon City earlier this month and it involved only the urban poor. What happens when the community lockdowns persist over a prolonged period of time, and food movement grounds to a halt.
Thanks to Secretary William Dar, the agriculture department (DA), exerted timely efforts, agri-fishery production was intensified and delivery of products to the markets is being pushed. It must move unhampered. It encountered friction during implementation but the insistent push and follow through was necessary to ensure that trade flows as freely as possible, and also to avoid food shortage.
The DA's initiative did not only focus on trade and feeding people alone. It initiated health and safety protocols to protect food producers and food workers at processing and retail levels and to minimize the spread of the disease.
Maintaining food supply chains by making our farmers and agricultural workers safe, seed distribution to support food production, unhampered food distribution, contributes towards the overall thrust towards a food secure and healthy nation fighting this deadly disease.
To all front liners and trailblazers in the agriculture sector in the midst of this fear against an unseen enemy, thanks. You are all heroes!