Of dreamers and doers

In my column last Saturday, I pressed the point about moving past our pain and frustrations from this pandemic crisis. Rather than mope around longing for the old normal of pre-COVID days, it is time to steel ourselves for present and future challenges. The past few years of record-breaking heat and precipitation, super typhoons, forest fires, biodiversity loss, and now the pandemic, tell us to change the way we treat the environment.

I’ve been having weekly online meetings since December with fellow alumni of the Master of Design program of Shu-Te University in Taiwan. Five of us decided to organize as a team to incubate ideas and develop design concepts for a post-COVID normal. We were the same team a couple of years back that designed a user interface and visual identity system for an imagined Cebu Bus Rapid Transit line for our course in Digital Content Design, and we’re still nostalgic about that.

A coffee commercial sums up the mood we want to set for ourselves and others: “Babangon tayo, susulong tayo.” (We will rise, we have to move forward.) Jobs may have been lost, but better jobs can be also created in a redesigned business environment post-corona. The time for waiting out the crisis has ended.

Even it may get worse before it gets better, there are many reasons to start the work for a better post-COVID world. For one, the leader of the free world, the United States, is finally back in hands of a sane and sober leader in Joe Biden. Expect the US under Biden to lead in addressing climate change and harness the better sense of American discovery and innovation.

In Cebu, with the number of COVID-19 cases on the rise again, authorities are not keen on putting the city back under stricter quarantine classification. Lockdowns are just too costly for the economy. But taming the case numbers while maintaining a relaxed quarantine status can only be done if people religiously follow the basic health protocols.

It means we should act as if we have the virus and everyone has the virus. We must wear a mask and maintain physical distancing at all times. If we religiously follow this rule, the virus has nowhere to go within the period of its entry and life cycle in a human host cell, and transmission is halted. In my case, I have mentally primed myself that wearing of masks and physical distancing will be a way of life until 2023.

Life does not have to be a drag under the new normal. Change may be difficult at first, but it is exactly the essence of life – of having the audacity to leave behind what used to work “for what you could become.”

I can give one example in the area of legal practice. The pandemic has accelerated the shift to digital transformation in the justice system. The Supreme Court is one of those institutions that has quickly adapted to the realities of the pandemic. Today, we have in place guidelines on the conduct of videoconferencing during court hearings. Work goes on full speed ahead at the Cebu City Hall of Justice at the Qimonda building, yet there are no more crowds.

The Supreme Court has also issued the 2020 Interim Rules on Remote Notarization of Paper Documents. The rules apply if one or both the notary public and the person seeking notarial service are located in an area under any community quarantine classification.

The future should excite us who are dreamers and doers, says one writer and audio story-teller writing for the New York Times.