We are hearing the ordinary daily wage earners and their difficulty in meeting the basic need for food on the table. And endlessly, we pray for sobriety, because there is no guarantee that people will still listen to controlling agencies if the government persist of playing deaf and dumb. I don’t have the answer, but God knows. And people know their limits, too.
The situation we are in is unmatched by anything in living memory. There is a lot of uncertainty and fear. And as the physical spaces we move around in become more limited, many of us have turned to cyberspace to ask questions, to seek solace, and to let out frustration and anger.
In this country, even before the COVID-19 pandemic, education has always been a class problem. We have seen how our educational system further intensifies the gap between the poor and the well-offs by making schools physically inaccessible and economically expensive. Online classes as a response to the pandemic underscores this economic divide.
Though the use of the double entendre “2020 vision” has been a dime a dozen in the first quarter of the year, please allow a reiteration of how blurry and bleak the future is at this point; hence this attempt at a “re-vision” (perhaps an exhausted turn of the phrase, but who isn’t exhausted these days?).
In about 60 pages, Jose Ma. Espino’s Into the White Hole (1986; WH) tells the story of twelve-year-old Joey, who discovered a fissure in time-space from his bed after an actual quake (not a metaphorical earth-shaking march of people that ousted a dictator which was an actual event in Philippine history that year). Spoilers ahead.