MEDIUM RARE
Stop calling them heroes but treating them like beggars.
Pushing them against the wall, taking pleasure in their desperation, waiting for them to make good their threat to quit en masse.
On National Heroes Day, doctors and nurses and other frontliners came out in small groups – without abandoning their patients – to give government one last chance to empathize.
What did they want? Only what was due them. Long-overdue releases of their benefits and the immediate resignation of the secretary of health.
We call them heroes and expect them to live on the praises heaped on them, hollow tributes not backed up by cash. Money is not the issue, no, only when you have enough. Pay them no lip service, please, just pay them what’s owed them.
Our “modern-day heroes,” like the OFWs before them, are expected to live and raise their families without food, shelter, water, fuel, all the little things that make up a 24-hour day’s comforts and conveniences. But because they are heroes, we need them to stay quiet in one corner, living off oxygen and glowing words, subsisting on the hifalutin promises of what’s legal and procedural, excuse me.
By this time some frontliners should have received their SRA – National Heroes Day was the deadline they gave DOH – but who knew that DTI would choose the day after the holiday to allow higher prices on goods as basic as sardines, milk, soy sauce, sugar, etc.? With P311 million earmarked for them, there then arose the question of giving or not giving the same allowances and benefits to those working “without direct contact with COVID patients.” For heaven’s sake, are DOH’s pencil pushers so mean, so small-minded they would stoop so low to pinch a few pesos? Frontline medical workers sweat it out at the risk of being infected by their patients, but minus the support of backroom staff, their work would be trivialized -- no hygiene and sanitation engineers, lab assistants and technicians, including those who disinfect equipment and rooms and dispose of medical waste? Imagine doctors and nurses being saddled with those chores.
How did we ever come to this disgraceful state of affairs, to be so grateful to our heroic frontliners and so taking them for granted?