As I write this, I know the tears from a friend’s face who just lost his job at ABS-CBN have yet to dry. Just an hour or so ago, we were conversing and he just suddenly blurted how he feels so low. Frankly, I try to avoid very emotional dialogues. As he went on with his dirge and diatribe, I really tried to listen well, but his sobs were painful to bear. In my mind, I kept hearing one word: Pathology.

A pathology is a deviation from propriety or an assumed normal state, the dictionary says. In this case, I am referring to a certain pathology in the operation of the Philippine polity or political system as a supposedly democratic one. In particular, I underscore the congressional bullying against a media outfit. How else can one describe what just happened to ABS-CBN’s application for a franchise?

In my previous column, I mentioned a pamphlet entitled “Now That You Are a Senator: An Introduction to Organizing the Work of a Senator of the Republic of the Philippines.” It is from former Senator and health secretary Juan Flavier. In that brief information material that he wrote and shared with members of the Philippine Senate during his time, he summarized the roles of legislators as falling into four main functions namely: Lawmaking, Public advocacy, Constituency building, and Government oversight.

These are functions that are mirrored by that other half of the Philippine Congress—the House of Representatives.

What we have seen in the ABS CBN live novella was a series of long-drawn sessions where Members of the House, our supposed Kinatawans, asked so many questions, badgering resource persons as they could. Interrogations!

In the end, the ABS CBN camp, despite essentially clearing its name of their alleged wrongdoings, was not granted a franchise for reasons only those 70 who voted not to grant said license could grasp.

In the process, thousands more have just been added to the already record-high numbers of unemployed in the country.

An exemplary case of Philippine democracy’s pathology, this is just one that I see in the House — instead of working on finding or creating means to manage our unemployment rate under the pandemic, among others, the concerned chamber of Congress went truly hard on ABS-CBN as a media corporation. As I pointed out, they just added thousands to the ranks of the 7.3 million Filipinos who are unemployed as of April.

If this Congress were not “pathological,” they should have been conducting long, passionate hearings instead to help craft better policies to address the pandemic and even anticipate the post-Covid scenario. They should, at least, be doing diligently the oversight function of looking into how the Bayanihan Heal as One (BAHO) law was implemented and how this creature called the IATF and Malacanang have been performing. But where were those Congressional inquiries and cross examinations of, at least, IATF leaders? As in the hearings for the ABS CBN franchise, where are the equally scathing remarks in public hearings on how the new loans of this country are being used or have been used?

Nowhere. There have been none except perhaps for one Senate inquiry in early May. Instead, what we have been fed so far with are late night and midnight sessions with officials tapping each others' backs for their supposed fine performance and singing hosannas to someone who was at times in a stupor.

Still, we need to ask: How have the billions in loans and donations for the Philippines been used? This is a question we all would like answered. I am sure we are more interested in this than on whether someone can properly recite the Philippines’ oath of allegiance.

Moreover, how do we continue to battle Covid after months of virtual failure? IATF’s strategy is still unclear. To say that we are just waiting for a vaccine is just too passive. We are not even fully reactive and responsive in the sense of having mass testing with contact tracing to programmatically control the spread of the virus. No wonder we are not having a second wave. We are still on the first wave and it continues to grow bigger by the day!

In his last Midnight Session — aka IATF update report— The President reportedly quipped that “Governance is not made of guesses. It has to be anchored on pure science."

He has got a point there. But did he perhaps mean Military Science? For many, what they have actually seen are the tens of thousands of arrests and inordinate sanctions meted out to the supposedly “pasaway” and “matitigas ang ulo.”

As the President himself and his spokesperson have suggested in their ramblings --we are now on our own. National government has nothing much to give anymore. I say we have virtually been on our own from the start. The highly militarized quarantine approach sans real mass testing and contact tracing to control the virus has merely made things more challenging for most Filipinos.

If Filipinos were truly pasaway, (if you want to see pasaway, watch online videos of the so-called Kens and Karens in th USA—anti-science extremists who openly and proudly breach laws; we barely have them here), I believe we would be seeing bigger numbers of those infected.

The spread of Covid is a health issue, but its spread as a pandemic has made it a political concern. We have to fight it as a disease using medical science, but—sans a cure especially a vaccine—we can only fully contain it by managing the movement and behavior of people; hence, the need for politics.

And there lies the rub. The very real and more virulent pathology now is with our polity.