CALL it old school, Jurassic or outdated but I really don’t mind doing and getting along with things that are not recent, modern or state-of-the-art. We learned a lot from the Greeks, Galileo, Newton, Shakespeare and even Charlie Chaplin. As a fine arts student, we were told to do the basics and start from scratch and so we sketched a crumpled paper with charcoal capturing its texture, lines and curves, lights and shadows and shape. Well, today, they do that with laptops, tablets, or computers that users call work-station.
Long before zippers, zip locks and ziplines, we learned our analogs, arithmetic and alphabets. Back then, we were contented with having AM transistor radios as among our sources of entertainment or information. We had books and bicycles for our knowledge enrichment and physical conditioning and we went to churches for our spiritual salvation.
Of course, city parks and cinemas thrilled us as we clamored for more fun. When we clamored for more and expanded our desires, we tried going to discos, danced with music from compact disks and went on with the developments of modern times with electronic technologies and others we later considered as essentials in modern-day living. We then acquired new things that kids today refer to like gadgets and I can go on enumerating things completing the alphabet up to XYZ but I'd like to delve more on what we are now into, the new normal.
With the world having experienced Spanish flu pandemic in 1918 infecting 500 million people or about a third of the world's population at the time, people learned to wear face-masks, adapted preventive measures as scientists raced to develop vaccines. Almost exactly 100 years after, this Covid-19 pandemic is again pushing humans to adapt new ways as medical technologists and researchers are still researching and testing antidotes or vaccines that would cure the thousands who tested positive with the out-breaking virus.
With the guidelines on community quarantines and lockdowns imposed by government units, we learned to abide by physical distancing and get accustomed to thermal scans, foot and tire bath and strict compliance to curfews and liquor bans. We are seeing more online services like selling, food ordering and delivery, teleconferencing, webinars and even mass services. Sadly, two of my nonagenarian uncles died very recently and my cousins were at the popular social media messenger informing us relatives that their departed father will be cremated and the urn will eventually be brought home to Sudipen, La Union when the pandemic is over and people can already travel. This is a time when flowers cannot be sent and brought to funeral parlors for departed loved ones as such services is understandably not possible because of strict guidelines.
My younger brother Francis wrote in his Facebook wall “Today May 17, 2020, two great uncles passed away: Placido Piaoan Pang-ot, 91 years old passed away at Maryland, USA. Apolonio Piaoan Belisoa, 92 years old, passed away at Quezon City. Both of them wished to go home to Sudipen, La Union but were put on lockdown due to Covid19.”
For the past two months, my official duties were mostly on work-from-home or WFH basis and I went to our office related functions directly for documentations showing my posted images as proofs of my accomplishments. Even my involvement with the NCCA National Committee on Cinema representing the Indigenous Peoples had several virtual meetings using a computer application similar to what big network personnel uses to broadcast from their respective homes. My grandson Joaquin Inigo who is still in Grade 1 now uses Skype to get tutorials from her tutor and according to DepEd, such online services with being among the new normal in the school curriculum.
I was covering our rolling store activity in Ampucao, Itogon, Benguet recently when I chanced upon four high school teachers facing each other around two adjoining tables to maintain safe distancing. Apparently, they were working on some lesson plans or checking submissions by their students. I approached them to inquire about how their school is adapting to the new DepEd proposal on online learning or coping with connectivity in their area. One of their response surprised me... the usual heavy clouds in the area impedes their internet signals. That reminded me of the basics of science.