JUST another day in the long and topsy-turvy history of ECQ. Another earthquake, this time in Occidental Mindoro, of moderate intensity, 5.4. Another seriously hot day, heat index at 43C felt in Metro Manila, much higher in the northern provinces. Another Sunday, May 10, except it was Mother’s Day, but wait! A traffic jam in the middle of a lockdown, on a street of shuttered restaurants in Quezon City?
Heaven and earth conspired to turn it into a spectacular, breakout Mother’s Day. A gridlock of Carmageddon and Apocarlyptic proportions happening in the middle of the day, in the middle of an enhanced community quarantine when people were supposed to be locked in at home. But devoted children, sons-in-law, daughters-in-law patiently (or not) could not be stopped from picking up their take-out meals with which to greet their Mama, Mommy, Nanay. From one intersection to the next, Tomas Morato St. was snarled in traffic. Where were the traffic police? Well, they didn’t anticipate this sort of quarantine backsliding, could they? Restaurant owners, having waited in the empty wings for far too long and hungry to see their customers again, were more than happy to serve them without fully opening their doors.
What a celebration! What a sight! What a sign of things to come when ECQ in QC is downgraded to GCQ and then totally lifted! What a foreboding of the “new normal” turning abnormal because as a highly sociable people we cannot keep away from other people, from our fiesta culture of marking every occasion and non-occasion with food and merriment. Cars slowing down hoping to catch a parking slot. Cars occupying every inch on the road. Cars violating every rule of traffic, damn the torpedoes for love of Mother.
Liberated as everyone else will be come Freedom Day, I will with determination avoid the stampeding horde and keep myself at home. I won’t join the millions rushing out of their cages for a taste of the outdoors. Friends, even before Mother’s Day, worry that the need for “social distancing” has not taken root except as a trendy part of the lingua franca.
After the Mother’s Day experience, what have we learned, if anything? Will we emerge stupider or stronger? Mother knows best. Ask her.
