The choices we make

"These will be the best gift to our people this Independence Day."

"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." — Dumbledore

That quote from Albus Dumbledore, Headmaster of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and the most powerful wizard of his time in the Harry Potter series, may well be our abiding guide as we navigate our way out of the COVID-19 pandemic. We have made our choices and we continue to make choices as the situation evolves.

From the start, President Duterte declared Lives Matter: Lives over Livelihood so we abided by his total lockdown. We agreed that indeed this will help us buy time to strengthen our health response system and flatten the COVID curve. It was not the cure but it was needed to slow down the transmission of the virus and let our people Live. Then, as the lockdown engendered public anxiety over mobility, loss of jobs and security and was proving not only to be a drain on public finance but also on the administration’s goodwill with not a few reports of corruption and favoritism in high places, easing up by stages became the effort. Not only to enable our people to restart their lives under a changing environment but also to draw fire away from the inefficiencies and incompetence of those assigned to implement the otherwise well intentioned guidance.

And now, after three months, we are about to get to the final stages of our transition to a new normal. That is supposed to be the trajectory as we and the rest of the world scramble to get back on track and move forward. Whether this guidance is the best of the choices we could have made early on remains to be seen.

Would it have been better if we followed the Japanese or Korean model which worked on a targeted lockdown, relied on individual responsibility and social discipline and harnessed the best that available technology could buy? Or at least Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore and even Indonesia, among our neighbors in ASEAN, which more or less followed the Japanese and Korean models with tweak of China in between? Or could we have been better off if we did the Swedish way with a bit of Germany and France? We will never know until we get to somehow normalize with the discovery of a vaccine and a cure to this pandemic.

For now, we have to make another choice: what kind of new normal are we going to have? Quite apart from the established protocols of mask wearing, hand washing, social distancing and stay-at-home-unless for essential travel, what should that new normal be? What medical response system should we have to ensure that we will not be locking down across the board every time we encounter another invisible enemy like COVID-19? Should we develop our own indigenous (traditional) medical responses in sync with that being bandied about by the pharmaceutical (Western) formulas? Should we now redirect public investments toward more and better health facilities and train medical responders from the ground up? Should we also redirect incentives away from the traditional sectors to the more basic ones such as health, education and environmental enhancement?

Equally important, what new industries and services should we now incentivize to create new wealth and sustain our economic restart efforts? What tweaking should we do with our basic sectors to ensure food security and re-energize existing sources of jobs and wealth? Given the make up of our economy with overseas employment and tourism and related service industries making up a substantial share of our GDP what measures should we now put in place to protect jobs, wages, families and communities dependent on these sectors? How are we going to transition these into viable and sustainable undertakings?

What lingering problems do we have to resolve to make the new normal a better and more equitable one? Are we prepared to overhaul the transport system in all its forms, ways and guises, for example? What about the power, water and telecoms sectors – the so-called commanding heights of the economy – what kind of overhaul need to be put in place again to ensure that we will no longer be hostage to monopolies and regulatory capture? What about the rules of engagement in all aspects of our daily existence which need to be tweaked to ease the pain not only of the lockdown but of living under a new normal situation? Our experience with this pandemic limited though it maybe should give us valuable lessons on how we can make our lives from hereon more humane and responsive to the greater good.

One basic concern is the universally credited health protocol of hand washing, mask wearing and social distancing. Should this now be the de rigueur for the new normal? How sure are we that these protocols will really do more good than our traditional ways? Will frequent hand washing be good for our skin in the long run? Will wearing masks for long periods of time not inhibit the means for us to refresh our bodies and reinvigorate our oxygen intake? As for social distancing, how long can we hold on to the practice without compromising our familial ways and enhancing bouts of isolation and depression?

On that note, we will be better off if we adopt the best practices of other countries like New Zealand, Vietnam, South Korea and other countries all of whom have gotten out of lock down or are getting back on track with minimal negative impact on both lives and livelihood. As an island nation should we consider an island-based new normal without breaking up the chain of connectivity inherent to our being one nation? Should we encourage zones of food sufficiency and jobs security on a per island basis and find ways to unlock the riches and resources of each and every area so we will have less migration to the already densely populated urban centers? Should we empower local governments to look outside for trade and tourism relations instead of relying more and more on the diktat and resources of an Imperial Manila? Should these zones be made more self-sufficient and sustaining including for their health, medical and educational needs, among others, rather than dependent on largesse from the center? These are choices which have to be made as we get back on track.

Indeed, this is the time for us to get around together and make the kind of choices which will ensure that the new normal will be a better, more equitable and sustainable future for us all. In this regard, we should encourage robust public discourse to enable each and every citizen to air their views to be distilled into a national accord for survival and development. Given proper encouragement and means, we as a people can muster the best suitable way to transit to the new normal. They should not be treated as ill tempered, undisciplined and, worse, unthinking needing to be herded to a pre-ordained future. The mess that the DoH, the principal agency in charge of our COVID-19 response, has done in the past three months should be the best lesson of the dangers of top-down, heavily centralized, bureaucratic ways of doing things. We should do away with that kind of mindset, ways and manners in the New Normal. These are the kinds of cobwebs we have to get rid of if we are to get back on track and truly restart our lives.

That will be our best gift to our people on this our 122nd Independence Day celebration.