The Legal Front
Atty. Arturo D. Brion, Ll.B, Ll.M.
COVID-19 came unannounced as the third decade of this century opened. It first broke out in China, a new and mysterious illness that initially baffled even the medical experts. The development was scary as China is practically a next-door neighbor. Chinese tourism in the Philippines was then also booming and the Chinese were seemingly everywhere, pushed largely by the overseas gaming operations that had almost become ubiquitous.
Thus, when our government declared a quarantine, my wife and I did not hesitate; we packed up and immediately left Manila. We moved back to our long-neglected provincial residence, constructed in 2000 but largely left unused except for infrequent weekend visits.
The move affected every aspect of our lives – the physical, emotional, social, political, and economic. But even the government found its fight against COVID difficult. Despite COVID’s deadly effects, many people simply refused to fully cooperate in its anti-COVID efforts.
From the start, some were wary of vaccination – the only partially effective remedy initially available. Others remained wedded to their old ways and continued to refuse to adjust. Despite obvious risks to life, others still simply lacked the will and the discipline to undertake the most basic measures that the situation requires.
By Christmas 2021, COVID appeared to be in retreat, giving people hope and opportunity for holiday fun. Many, though, misunderstood the situation and the risks of COVID, or simply disregarded the rules of ordinary commonsense: they celebrated in their usual pre-COVID merry ways, oblivious to the dangers that still lurked.
News reports bear witness to our jampacked shopping malls, and the parties and reunions held despite clear restrictions. An elitist few even tried to evade mandatory quarantine for international travelers. There were also reports of on-board disputes between plane crews and passengers who refused to wear masks. Worse, not a few continued to insist on the primacy of their individual right to their body, using this excuse to resist vaccination, to the prejudice of the community and public interest.
I shall dwell on the private/public interest issue in another article and for now shall focus on my current point – the unheralded COVID treasures that I experienced and am thankful for. I am sure that aside from myself, many others reaped their own private benefits from COVID and should be as thankful as I am; these benefits would have otherwise remained hidden and untapped, perhaps to everyone’s prejudice.
A first benefit for me (and this may perhaps surprise some) is health awareness and renewed health. COVID made me aware of my age, my limitations, and my state of health. At 75 years old, my wife and I belong to the vulnerable sector, made more so by our active co-morbidities.
After our contemporaries – childhood friends, classmates and even former students - began dying, we became thankful that we opted from the beginning to seriously isolate ourselves.
Unaware of the trend, I even became a part of the Great Resignation when I discerned that employment’s stresses could worsen my own and my wife’s co-morbidities. Resignation was a high price to pay, but on hindsight, not when survival is at stake.
COVID also alerted us to the importance of medical professional advice, an awareness that we glossed over before COVID came. We therefore began to see our doctors regularly and to closely follow their advice. Barring a rogue infection and God willing, we may now be in better health than before COVID.
Isolation, although dreadful to contemplate, cannot be totally bad and must bring with it some benign consequences. Every yin has its yang. Sometime after our isolation began, I began to recognize that If I could not be physically and socially mobile, my remaining recourse is to travel inward into the deeper realm of thought that my previous busy schedule denied me. Thus, I began to meditate and pray, and to devote significant time to mental activities.
In this mode, I took a close look at myself, my personal wants and needs, my career and capabilities, and the opportunities available to me, given the current situation and my limitations.
I arrived at two significant conclusions. First, an open option for me is to continue to study and learn in order to seize whatever opportunities may come my way in the future; neither COVID nor my infirmities bar me from doing these.
Thus, I began a regime of self-learning: I began teaching myself new things based on the resources and materials within my reach. To my surprise, I found that there are a lot of readily available resources, some even for free, in these internet days. I found the You Tube, Discovery, National Geographic, Netflix, Google search, DuckDuckGo and Wikipedia, very useful, among others. These alone gave me more than I care to handle, on history, law, politics, education, nature, animals, dogs and languages – the magnets for my interests. Writing became fun and more exciting.
Self-learning is an added dimension to my life and a potential that would have remained untapped, had COVID and its enforced isolation not intervened. I fully credit COVID for this discovery.
My self-learning initiatives also led to another awareness – that I need not remain dormant in my disappointment over our legal education system. For various reasons (that I discussed ad nauseam in my pre-COVID columns), I had been despairing about the state of our legal education; with no official role or position, I had practically given up.
My enforced isolation made me realize that I had all along been looking at the larger legal education picture, at the larger forest while disregarding the trees. Hidden within this forest are small groves of legal education trees that a retired legal professional can help to improve, on his own, even if only through the students he can reach by actively teaching. Thus, I decided to again teach and this is where I am now – thankful and at peace that I am still doing something to further legal education in our country.