State of siege

The Bureau of Immigration says that international terrorists planned a series of bombings in Mindanao during the Holy Week. Prompt action by the authorities foiled that devious effort.

Why these terrorists would want to do that baffles me completely. A campaign of terror during this time will be completely redundant.

As things stand, we are a nation completely terrorized by a pandemic which has yet to be fully understood and for which no vaccine has been developed. We have no room left for additional, politically generated fear. Any new attack by mad bombers will only inspire exasperation.

SARS, by many indications, has entered the country. It came to us in the most casual way.

Adela Catalon kissed her roommate’s mother goodbye as she embarked for a journey home from Toronto. Her friend’s mother was SARS-infected.

A few days into what was supposed to be a happy homecoming, Adela died. Her father died soon thereafter. Her home community in Alcala, Pangasinan is now quarantined.

We are now a nation under siege. An entire community is now "hamletted" – that dreadful term we inherited from the Vietnam war to describe the forced isolation of pockets of population.

The large oceans were supposed to protect us from this terrifying plague. But the facility of air travel – once the crucible of modern civilization – negates distance as a hindrance to infection.

Like all parasitic and destructive viruses, whatever causes SARS cannot survive for more than a few hours outside the human body. When travel was by foot – or at best, by boat – this destructive strain of the corona virus might have wiped out a small village in rural China and then itself died out.

The virus could have joined the dinosaurs on the list of extinct beings. But no museum would have been constructed for this unseen killer. The plague that wiped out a village would have been attributed to the wrath of gods for some minor, totally rural, misdemeanor.

I have nothing intelligent to add to the medical aspects of this global killer that was, only weeks ago, completely unforeseen.

I do not wish to add to the hysteria that now sweeps every society where a death has been attributed to a viral strain science has not yet fully described.

I must, for reasons of scientific incompetence, limit myself to making sociological notes about how societies behave in the face of a disease without existing antidote.

Airports, once monuments to what is modern in our way of life, have now become the grim frontlines in what will likely be a futile effort at insisting that national boundaries also become septic frontiers. With no available scientific option we would like to imagine that a horrible virus, like unwanted aliens, could be stopped by the diligent work of our immigrations personnel.

Airports, where people from all over converge in transit, are the natural nodal points for contamination. It does not really matter if a plane coming in originates from a SARS-infected area. Its passengers might have contacted the virus in the transit lounges during stopovers.

National boundaries were meant to control the ingress and egress of people. The paradigm of nation was never constructed to confront the threat of plagues.

Despite our best efforts, we must understand that airports are puny frontlines for keeping the disease out. And once the virus is in, the frontline becomes irrelevant.

We see today that the active line of battle against this plague is not the NAIA anymore, but some desolate village in Alcala, Pangasinan. In that line of battle, we can only attempt to contain the plague and do so by inconveniencing large numbers of people. We don’t have the antidotal weapon on hand to kill the virus before it kills more of us.

Overnight, the surgical mask has become the fashion. It is the proper gear for taking to the streets, going to work and performing such high-risk duties as stamping the passports of tourists.

But science now tells us that the mask is a futile means of defense. The virus can attack us through the appealingly moist and indecently exposed surface of our eyes.

We can all wear goggles, eventually, to complement the mask. When street fashion takes that turn, our communities will resemble the most horrific futuristic movies generated by the last decade’s mood of pessimism regarding mankind’s fate.

Scientists are now telling us that it might take a year to develop an antidote to whatever causes SARS. That might be optimistic. It has taken us over a generation to develop an antidote to the virus that causes AIDS. And even then, the best we could manage with an expensive cocktail of drugs is to delay the onset of death.

Among the most compelling novels I ever read was La Peste (The Plague) by Albert Camus. It is a classic in French existentialism and imagines how human relations and attitudes are radically reshaped by an unstoppable calamity.

That novel haunts me now, even as I have lost my copy of it.

What I recall from it is this lesson: in the face of calamity, when the core of our humanity is challenged, we will tend to exhibit empathy we never knew existed.

At this point, we cannot imagine the full course of this pandemic. We cannot imagine how it will change our lives and how it will reshape our civilization. It is a disease that travels through the most vital channels of modern global interaction.

What is sure, in the face of this horrible plague, is that the traditional sources of terror, that inflicted by fanatics possessed by dead and deadly ideologies, appear to simply and controllable. It is far easier to guard a mall against a mad bomber than to guard a village against a malevolent virus.

The parameters of the war against international terror are clear. Within those parameters, albeit with minor debate, we have reached some sort of consensus about approaches and methods.

But the parameters of this war against a plague are unknown.

Terrorists and despots we can deal with by throwing a few smart bombs at them. But how can we bomb a virus that clings to our tears?