Posture

THE RECENT arrest of eight persons participating in a rally outside the gates of the University of the Philippines (UP) Cebu made me suddenly remember Noy Usting.

Uniformed and non-uniformed members of the Cebu City Police Office (CCPO) detained seven members of cause-oriented groups and one pedestrian for violating the general community quarantine (GCQ) protocols specified in section 4 of the Omnibus Guidelines released by the Inter-agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases.

A SunStar Cebu team reported on June 6 that the Police Regional Office (PRO) 7 director, Police Brigadier General Albert Ignatius Ferro, said the rallyists endangered the public by illegally gathering in a pandemic and possibly infecting others.

What if the police had waited for the rallyists to finish airing their protest against the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 and then, in an orderly fashion, transported all the participants for testing of coronavirus disease (Covid-19) before pressing charges, if any? They could have netted the whole caboodle, instead of just eight fingerlings.

Would being detained for joining a mass assembly be the best way to jump the queue for Covid-19 testing in this country?

Thus, the hot spectacle outside the UP Cebu gates, with all the officers hardly dressed appropriately to listen and endure until the protests ended. Weighed down by high-powered firearms and what must be the next-gen anti-riot full-body OOTD (probably also anti-Covid-19 since the troops did not practice physical distancing, unlike the rallyists), any being inside that unwieldy carapace would be human in his or her response to the ensuing “hot pursuit” and “assault against persons in authority” that Ferro accused the rallyists of instigating.

Noy Usting would have handled the situation differently. A member of the university’s maintenance team when I was an undergraduate, Noy Usting joined many of our rallies and sit-ins. Sometimes, with a broom in hand, he paused and stood at the periphery. Or he sat down among us, smiling to acknowledge greetings but never disrupting the attention of people listening to the speaker.

Joining us in those rallies did not have any material impact on his life. Noy Usting’s silent presence, though, concretized for my fellow students and I what being in UP means, what being subsidized by the taxpayers obligated us to, why it matters to discuss issues many choose to unsee.

In the reckoning of the world, the late Noy Usting was a man of no power. Of one thing, though, I am convinced: he had civility, a quality that evaporates in the presence of power. Thus, we settle for posture.



Tom and Jerry. Source: maacindia.com



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in the June 7, 2020 edition of SunStar Cebu’s Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Civility

THE OTHER night, I was covering with plastic a book about Van Gogh’s sunflowers when my godson mentioned the Facebook ranting over book buyers cutting in lines so that they could pay for their purchases.

I instantly recalled our experience with “jumpers” on the second to the last day of the same book exhibit. My son and I were pushing a cart following the demarcated route to the cashier when a girl jumped the queue to stand ahead of us.

Two of her girl friends then joined her, adding their books to her pile.

I could sense my older son’s hackles rising. The fellow following us said, loud enough for everyone to hear: That’s rude.

I looked at the girls but their eyes would not meet mine. The first jumper, though, had a slight smile, as if she had just passed a difficult hurdle and joined the Olympians.

I agree; she crossed the line separating those who follow rules and the ones who consider themselves beyond the pale.

Online civility, or the lack of it, has become a rising research interest, given the “cracks” exposed by the bullying and bashing on social media. In efforts to improve how digital netizens engage and interact, a word with fusty associations, “etiquette,” has been given a spin, “Netiquette”.

But scratch the surface of the neologism and we are back to basics. While the term “civility” wends its way increasingly in contemporary discourse, I prefer its older cousin: politeness.

To be polite is to be conscious of and respect people. Coming on time. Listening to a person before reacting. Going to the end of a queue and waiting for one’s turn.

Even though conventions accommodate the elderly or the disabled to grant them access to the start of the line without queueing up, many of those given this privilege still fall in line or excuse themselves before stepping in front of another person.

Connecting with other people seems to be what reading fiction is all about. Sympathy and its even more sensitive relation, empathy, circulate in the same circles as education, culture, and art.

Linear reading—which is reading from start to finish, the pattern usually associated with traditional books made of paper—teaches, at the very least, patience. One can, of course, jump ahead and read the end of the tale.

That would short-circuit the underestimated pleasure from delayed gratification.

Thus, the rearing of incivility and the other Gorgon’s head of entitlement was unexpected in an event where there seemed to be more books than people.

Stepping into someone’s shoes comes naturally when one reads. Unless, of course, one is simply buying, not reading, books.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 29, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”