Turnaround on seniors

In yet another demonstration of its seeming hit-and-miss approach to the public health crisis gripping the nation, Malacañang has turned around on its announcement barring Filipinos 60 years and older from venturing outside their homes even in areas under general community quarantine.

The pushback against the unreasonable imposition was so swift and vehement as to compel the Palace mouthpiece and other worthies to backtrack and say that, yes, senior citizens may leave their homes for work and important errands concerning their general well-being when the Luzon-wide lockdown is relaxed and what will amount to the new normal clicks in.

Once more, the public at large has been apprised of the quality of discussion and decision-making taking place in the highest echelons of government — and it’s shockingly shallow and supercilious, bereft of nuance, sensibility, and an awareness of how a substantial number of the population lives.

It’s of a piece with the behavior of a popular “influencer” who, apparently astounded at the mass of humanity clogging the streets early on the first day of the lockdown, demanded online to know what these “motherfuckers” were doing. The post showed the woman prettily ensconced in the luxury and comfort of her home, perhaps the better to represent the brands she was pushing.

But she was hardly cool, just clueless that the rug had been pulled out from under the feet of the great toiling majority by the late-night announcement of the lockdown, and now they, including the health workers who would prove indispensable in the fight against the new coronavirus, were desperate to find all means possible to get to work.

The pervading ignorance in these parts, the callousness, is hair-raising. On the matter of the earlier proposed exclusion of Filipinos 60 years and older from active participation in the workings of professional life, the administration, represented by the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases in charge of the Philippine response to the COVID-19 pandemic, behaved in a manner not only arbitrary but also illogical and wrong-headed. Ostensibly operating on the notion that it was being protective of senior citizens, it merely emphasized an authoritarian mindset marked by such optics as police in military gear and such terminologies as “hard lockdown.”

What the task force was actually proposing was house arrest for senior citizens (and teenagers), apparently having arrived at the absurd conclusion that, to a man and woman, these sectors knew no better and needed to be delivered from certain endangerment.

Quoted in a report, however, Sergio Ortiz-Luis Jr., president of the Employers Confederation of the Philippines, laid it down in plain terms for even simple-minded influencers to understand: The task force is in effect blacklisting senior citizens, which may lead to the permanent loss of work and income for many. The proposal discriminates against senior citizens. It will harm them instead of protect them. It will also harm the economy that benefits from their mental and physical labor.

On top of all that, we might add, senior citizens such as the captains of industry can conceivably be depended upon to leave their homes wearing the requisite face mask or covering and to observe proper physical distancing in the company of others. These are, after all, appropriate measures to ensure their own safety — and who will convincingly say that, having come this far, they will drop the necessary precautions and willfully risk their life and ultimately the lives of their loved ones as well?

Mercifully, the task force has seen its way clear to rethinking its dangerous stance. This encouraging step will hopefully lead to other measures aimed at benefiting the senior citizens it is supposedly determined to protect, such as more lines devoted for their exclusive use at drugstores and supermarkets, and, in the informal-settler areas, a quicker way to get relief services to them.

That we are all in this together should be top of mind in these terrible times. Old age — or youth — should not be taken against anyone by officials responsible for public health.

It would also be helpful for enforcers to be trained to view senior citizens’ supposed lockdown infractions not as willful acts of aggression but as attempts to find a way to regain lost livelihoods, even dignity. This means, among others, another look at the supposed efficacy of 48-hour hard lockdowns in the dense impoverished communities: Do these lockdowns produce satisfactory results for the residents, old as well as young, or do they merely serve to push oppressive realities into tinderbox conditions?