MAKESHIFT barriers sprouted like mushrooms after a night of rain in our neighborhood shortly after Cebu City Mayor Edgar Labella placed the city under quarantine. Although shoddily assembled from scrap materials, it is as difficult to breach them as to go past a German checkpoint during World War II (okay, I was not born then but I saw the movies) because of the volunteers who man them.
A member of the household, who works as a social worker at the Cebu City Medical Center, learned that first-hand. She walks from home to work, passing through a small road named after the comic character, Espongklong, and crossing P. Del Rosario Ext. to another small road that leads to the Natalio Bacalso Ave.
On the day that the checkpoint appeared, she was stopped, asked where she worked and was told that she could not use the road anymore because she was a hospital worker.
Now define discrimination.
It turned out that our situation is not unique. Other barangays have erected their own checkpoints, too. One of them is Labangon, which has been in the news lately because of a video that has gone viral showing a nurse arguing with village watchmen over entry to her place and because of the number of Covid-19 cases discovered in one of its sections.
Let’s talk about the case of the nurse and the watchmen. It is claimed that she was not discriminated against and certainly not because she worked in a hospital. That is not what the video shows. As in the case of the CCMC social worker, the nurse was told that she had to be denied entry because of the place where she worked. If it was not discrimination, I do not know what is.
What was doubly troubling was the behavior of the guards throughout the encounter. They were arrogant. When the nurse asked what the problem was, she got a sarcastic reply implying that she already knew the answer. A voice can also be heard in the background snidely telling her to buy a condomnium unit instead.
She just came from work and needed rest. Not only did they deny her that, they insulted her.
I do not know if the men in the video were tanods or if they were just residents doing self-help. The distinction may seem unimportant since the barangay captain has implied that the men had authority but the tanod at least has undergone training on how to handle sticky situations such as the one with the nurse. That is why the mayor trusted them to become force multipliers in order to augment the police force.
The barangay checkpoints are not a bad idea. The barangay captains just have to make sure that they are manned by competent men and by that I mean people who at least understand—and practice — the good old virtue of good manners and right conduct.
Lawyer and Cebu Port Authority AGM Ping Uckung has a very interesting question: What makes liquor so important that allowing its sale should be prioritized as the first and only amendment to the rules governing the enhanced community quarantine?
I have no answer to that question and since the mayor’s plate is full, I am referring it to City Administrator Floro Casas Jr.