IT’S easy nowadays to fall into some kind of funk. Even worse, it’s so easy to fall into some level of depression. Everything around you, it seems, is conspiring to make this happen.
And I use the word “conspiring” quite intentionally.
First, the news around you is nothing but depressing. It’s all about rising case rates and death rates and hospitals that no longer admit patients because they are filled to the brim.
It’s about a friend here or a relative there who tests positive or, worse, turns critical. It’s about this or that friend or relative who fails to make it. And despite the fact that every day thousands come away with just a mild case of the virus and thousands eventually survive to tell their tale, it’s the death here and the death there that weighs down on us far more than the survivors here or there.
I personally find myself cheering whenever someone I know posts a belated report on Facebook of his or her successful battle with COVID, and when I have the time I even take pains to read every story. Because I know what it means to go through the struggle, and I see my own story in the many stories I have been reading since April of this year. I understand the hopes and the fears because I had them myself. And reading other peoples’ stories not only relives in me my 12 days of struggle; more importantly they remind me of how fortunate I was to have been able to walk out alive to tell my story and to use it to help others cope with their own struggles.
But the depression is worsened by reports that people did take time to make money out of our miseries, and make money in the hundreds and hundreds of millions. Again, as I’ve said before, profiteers during times of crises are nothing new. But this is an unprecedented crisis and it takes a special form of greed to be counting money while people die. And that’s what happened. Under the very nose of a leadership that has since 2016 been telling one and all how much it abhors corruption and that a mere whiff of this will mean something akin to the medieval “off with your head.”
Unfortunately, the very nose of our leadership seems unable to smell any longer, perhaps a victim to long COVID. This is the kind way to put it, because the unkind way to put it is to suspect that the anti-corruption avowals were simply smoke and mirrors meant to distract us.
So, on the one hand, you are every day pummeled with worn stories of relatives and friends falling ill and even dying, while on the other hand you are pummeled with reports of billions of pesos being siphoned off by the greedy with the right connections to make tons of money out of a pandemic. And all the while you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel because there doesn’t seem to be any plan or, if there is in fact a plan, you now wonder if it is even working at all.
When will it all end?
Not any time soon unfortunately, but eventually, baby step by baby step. It will not end even after we have cast our ballots in May of next year, but that too will be a baby step. A lot of baby steps actually. But it won’t be enough and in many ways will, if we make the right decision, just be some important baby steps leading to the eventual end of all of these, what I call our long national nightmare.
Until then we just need to brace, get jabbed if we haven’t done so yet, try to keep healthy and rely on that Filipino spirit that mixes good cheer with some spirituality and luck to see is thorough these dark times.
No one knows when it will all end, but let’s promise each other to be together to celebrate when it does.
