“COVID is not primarily a test of our political convictions. It is a test of our flexibility, resourcefulness and above all, our humanity.”—Tim Lahey, Vermont, USA-based infectious disease doctor and ethicist.
Figures don’t lie and they point to a fair measure of inadequacy and inappropriateness in our response to Covid. But before pointing a finger at anybody we must first accept our share of the blame.
We are inadequate in our response to Covid because we are not fighting it as human, not even as Filipino. Judging from the cacophony in social media, we are fighting Covid as persons with pre-existing political convictions. We’d rather endanger everyone else’s health than accept facts that do not sit well with those convictions.
Both sides of the country’s political divide respond to Covid not as Filipinos but first and foremost as members of the opposition or supporters of the administration. Some others respond solely as communist revolutionaries.
Meanwhile, Manila Auxiliary Bishop Broderick Pabillo in deploring as “embarrassing and worrisome” our having the highest rate of infection in Asia betrays the Catholic Church’s own political bias. A religious bias should have made Bishop Pabillo deplore the more “embarrassing and worrisome” fact that Catholic Philippines has the most number of poor people in the region.
If you look at countries (Germany, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam etc.) that are successful in fighting Covid-19, they respectively set aside all pre-existing convictions, political or otherwise, and fight Covid-19 as one nation. They show a lot of humanity in putting aside whatever divides them and fighting as one an enemy that makes no political, racial or financial distinctions.
In contrast, mighty USA is failing miserably because they are now divided politically and racially. Likewise, the Philippines is the least successful in the Asean because we insist on responding to Covid-19 as denizens of a political world. Instead of being flexible and resourceful, we exacerbate the situation by holding out immovable within the thick walls of our political castles.
Covid-19 clearly calls for us to become the loving and compassionate humans we ought to be. To defeat it, we must come together as one Filipino nation to help ourselves and others (regardless of political affiliations) get through this grim time of crisis in our life.
In this trying time, there’s nothing trite or passé about the saying, “United we stand, divided we fall.” To be victorious over Covid-19, we must pass the test of our humanity by putting aside pre-existing political convictions and fight the virus first and foremost as compassionate humans and as one nation of flexible and resourceful Filipinos.