Already, there is serious effort to think ahead, to plan ahead, even as we enter the final week of ECQ hereabouts. About time indeed.
To this day, we have focused ourselves in the dominant resolve to keep everyone out of harm’s way, given the frightening prospect of being infected by so deadly a disease. Fear, more than hope, has been the reason why we’ve stayed generally compliant. Fear that the lethal virus shall find host in our frail body to thrive and be a source of infecting others — our loved ones, our neighbors, and fellow humans just as scared as us of the affliction.
To this day, the struggle in us to prevail persists, even as deep anxiety gets written in our face. By and large, we may have critically averted the onslaught rush by fear-induced obedience to health precautionary and safety measures put in place early on. Three weeks into that struggle, small successes may have been won, chiefly because we were just stiff-scared of getting the dreaded virus. These may not have been crowning victories, but triumphs we’d take any time.
Acts of charity, willingly shared, have also been done straight from the heart, signifying that all will never be lost when the heart purifies itself by magnanimous deeds, small or big. The wave of shared contributions from those having the most in life has been so infectious that to the last man and woman we know, the giving has gone beyond normal limits. Just as well indeed.
Frontliners have done their magnificent, selfless best to keep the the few well cared for, ably attended the best they can. We say few because that’s what the numbers are— just a scanty number hereabouts, in contrast to the gallopping figures racing upwards elsewhere, nationally, internationally even. Great effort there, touches of heroism that make us hopeful.
Going into ECQ’s final week, amid the continuing turbulence we face, there’s good sense to now think ahead and plan for eventualities hovering in a matter of days. Selective, localized quarantine? Why not? Given the damage inflicted into our way of life, decidedly now fully restrained to marooned levels, there should be time apportioned for the hereafter, shouldn’t it? Given the escalating loss of opportunities — jobs, business, supply of vital needs —- why not indeed?
Decidedly, suffering can only be as bearable as the capacity to endure withstands the daily battering it can absorb. At a certain point in time, that too will snap, bit by and bit, until it wobbles down to plain inutility. Why wait indeed for that looming eventuality? Why procastinate as if that happenstance isn’t forthcoming just as yet?
To be sure, there are sensible reasons supporting such a parallel effort to put our economic needs back to even secondary importance. Job losses are hitting and hurting people without respect to social and economic standing. The wealthy may be getting it in the chin, but those without any respectful means to begin with are hit harder, are suffering through and through.
Deprived to work by the tough retrictions put in place, they simply had to endure, abjectly reduced to two, not three, square meals that have lost much of the nutrients body and soul need. Government’s assistance may have come their way — not as fast and timely as complained about — but where would such relief carry them through, except for a week or two?
To be sure, public health and safety is eminently up there in any consideration moving forward. Decisions to re-open critically hit sectors of the economy have to be science-based and science-mandated, minded as we are that the small victories achieved, even worthily earned, may lull us to set aside what have been so painstakingly accomplished by dint of hard, persevering, self-sacrificing work.
At day’s end, it should always be what is the greatest good for the greatest number, foremost of which is to be mindful of public risk to everyone — the hard worker, the hard-nosed entrepreneur among others. All this time, we listened, we complied and we obeyed and we accepted every single effort to keep us out of risk every step of the way. All for the greater good.
And yet, what good is it for the body to be in good health unable to be productive every which way there is — if we can’t be transported to jobs that are not there, if workplaces are not well-protected to keep us out of danger, if health precautions are mindlessly set aside, if physically safe distances are not observed from each other, if hand-washing habits are not practised, if personal hygiene is not done as a matter of course, if facemask wearing is not abided?
To be sure, Mayor Benjie has admirably been in the forefront of city-led interaction to get workable, adaptable, doable plans for resilience and recovery going. He has been foreward-looking beyond the days ahead, concerned that when the tough times are decidedly easing up, the readiness to spring into action is at hand.
He realizes that opportunities for growth need to be made available anew, not just to retrieve what had been lost, but to create new pathways down the road the city must take. He is well convinced that an economy so badly hit needs convalescence of some kind, principally instigated by government initiative as led by a listening, heedful, and quick-acting leadership. In this effort, he is in command. Towards a well-defined goal, sought to be achieved by technology-aided strategic solutions, he manifests confidence built up from many exacting years of deeply honed skills.
There is reason to hope for that in time, and by strategic phases of keenly shepherded execution, our critical engines of growth will hum once more. Much have been lost in education, tourism, business, trade and commerce, transportation, construction, the service industries. Much work have to be done, alongside the need to remain primordial in sustaining hard-won efforts to keep everyone healthy, safe, and well-protected from the ravaging onslaught in our midst.
We’re all for the headstart to give our floundering economy the strategic push. We just have to get ourselves prepped up to bounce back and re-grow. Slowly but steadily, this ought to be the quality and pace of forthcoming efforts. Our business and labor sectors need all the helping out measures by all means possible, ensuring that no one will be deprived and denied just as much as government does to the menacing virus.
When the going gets tough, only the tough gets going. That is us, together in the best of spirit, while apart in the safest way.
