IT was like a thief in the dead of the night when it chilled my body into fever and barbed my throat to reject food. That’s how we know that Covid in the time of Omicron finally hit home and hit personally. The symptoms lasted for 3 foodless days, negligible lifespan of symptoms that impair the body compared to long-lasting symptoms that impair the nation, so I thought consolingly.
Never before that the nation became so mindful of symptoms like in this pandemic. They have become the unwelcomed visitors of households and public places, the dreaded presence on queues and the great spoilers of events.
Now comes the election season again and the experience with symptoms becomes more cerebral as the wired mind stay restless in quarantine surfing the internet and scanning social media. Rising temperature is no longer confined to body malaise, but reaction to issues that have remained unresolved election after election.
Corruption, poverty and underdevelopment remain the standard issues that presidential aspirants promise to address while trying to look more confident than Covid doctors who are battling not only the symptoms but the root cause itself. More than issues these are symptoms of moral deficiency in society and government, a persistent disease that is brought about by the virus of greed and forever mutating variant of dishonesty.
From moral reformists to social revolutionaries, there is that unceasing effort to distinguish symptoms from the root cause. Reformists believe in inoculating society with values and virtues while revolutionaries want more lasting solutions like changes in relationships involving the sharing and utilization of the country’s wealth.
While we have seasonal viral pandemics, we have a perennial pandemic of apathy that wrongly and rightly resolves itself into divisive but needed debate during elections strengthening by circumstance our herd immunity in support of democracy.
Like the Covid vaccines that we welcome, although not without any iota of doubt, we welcome the coming elections with hope for the best but not without suspicion that misanthropy will not rear its ugly head again.
While we wait for president after president, believers of Filipino democracy have no other option other than to engage in a continuing moral revolution to foster our historically founded values of Diyos, Bayan and Kapwa and the virtues they give birth to.
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