Public morale

The massacre on Mother Ignacia is over.

No need for an autopsy, no need to search for answers. We know why it happened, and the consequences are heartbreaking. Easily, half of the 11,000 ABS-CBN employees may no longer have jobs by the end of August. And this is happening in the middle of a pandemic.

The epitaph could be written in so many ways:

“Killed because of its oligarch owners”

“Death by 70 enablers out to please their gods”

“Massacred for its journalism”

Let’s move on, say the killers. Leave it to the Department of Labor and Employment’s One-Stop Shop to find new jobs for the retrenched workers.

Oh, how I wish we really could all move on from this issue and everything that’s happening in our country. But how can we?

ABS-CBN is just one problem. There’s a lot more.

The monsters are wrecking the town. They want everything quashed, killed and dismantled, thrown into a common grave – press freedom, voices of dissent, oligarchs and what have you.

Oligarchs

Dismantling the oligarchs remains a fervent wish of this administration. But weaponizing the law to close their companies is just doing it the way oligarchs do to stay in power.

Going after the businesses of billionaire families in this country, or those not on the good side of the present administration, is a myopic way of doing things. What really needs to be done is to address the Spanish-era patronage politics or palakasan system in the country so that laws and policies are not formulated for the sole benefit of a powerful few.

Destroying old oligarchs only to replace them with new ones will simply continue the cycle of our oligarchy economy.

Terror

And then there’s the Anti-Terror Act.

The dreaded measure is now in place. It gives the government the power to defeat terrorists.  But who differentiates the real terrorists from the critical voices?

Meanwhile, the number of COVID-19 cases has risen past 63,000 and the health secretary thinks the Philippines has flattened the infection curve.

To curb the spread, policemen will go house-to-house to search for COVID-19 patients, an eerie reminder of what they did in the violent drug war.

It seems the generals of the government’s anti-COVID-19 efforts are just experimenting. Four months were wasted because there was no mass testing, contact tracing and enough planning.

Economy

The result of all these distractions is an economy that is barely surviving.

Many companies – more than a fourth or 26 percent of the private sector, according to the Trade department – have closed. Others are laying off workers and some industries are on the verge of collapse.

Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III said putting Metro Manila on extended general community quarantine may further harm the economy. I agree.

As it is, the economy is expected to contract by at least two percent this year. I’m betting it would be worse.

Woes

Indeed, there’s a litany of woes we are all facing these days. It gets tiring really to wake up to more problems and punches that keep coming our way.

How I wish I could write about anything but this. Say, clear blue skies and birds chirping in our neighborhood. Or, fairytales and happy endings or a bouquet of flowers from an anonymous sender.

But how does one turn a blind eye to what’s happening to our country especially in these crazy times?

And so I write, again and again, in an attempt to disentangle everything that we’re going through. It is a lament for the dead and an ode to the strange and surreal that continue to haunt us as a nation. This is real and painful to the core.

What’s really dying

Sadly, what the monsters are really killing are so much more than just press freedom, or a media giant, or the thousands of voices of dissent, or oligarchs who will never run out of billions anyway.

What’s really dying these days is what’s inside us – our morale and battered spirit, already at an all-time-low because of COVID-19.

Public morale is dying because we see authorities violating the same rules they want us to obey. It is dying because we see lawmakers’ brazen use of power to get what they want. It is dying because of the gaslighting that’s happening around us. It is dying because our health authorities don’t know how to deal with COVID-19 and its new strain.

But most of all, it is dying because our leaders are so distracted with so many things, instead of solving the public health crisis and keeping our economy alive.

The year is overwhelming enough for all of us, no thanks to the killer virus. The last thing we need are senseless and endless tirades, which only make us feel even more uncertain about what lies ahead.

Now more than ever, we need to hold on to something. We need to be hopeful that our leaders will lead us out of this deadly pandemic.

We need heroes to give us even just a flicker of hope in these brutally uncertain times.

But on the contrary, what we feel instead is that there’s Thanos out there on overdrive, continuously snapping his fingers.

Iris Gonzales’ email address is [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @eyesgonzales. Column archives at eyesgonzales.com