One Flew Over Koko's Nest

                                      (photo: philstar..com)

Pagka Iresponsable! Flooding the social media sites are the condemnation of Senator Koko Pimentel’s actions as he went to Makati Medical Center to accompany his wife who will deliver their baby anytime. There, he allegedly received a call announcing that he is positive of the COVID 19.

The Philippine Star reported: The Makati Medical Center on Wednesday evening said that Sen. Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel III, who announced earlier in the day that he tested positive for the new coronavirus disease, breached its strict infection and containment protocols on Tuesday night (March 24, 2020).

This prompted the hospital to issue this statement: “Pimentel, whose result for COVID-19 testing turned out to be positive, brought his wife to the hospital for delivery via cesarean section. By being in MMC, [the senator] violated his Home Quarantine Protocol, entered the premises of the [Medical Center Delivery Room Complex], thus, unduly exposed healthcare workers to possible infection,” Medical Director and Interim Co-CEO Dr. Saturnino Javier said.

Critics lambasted the actions of the senator who directly apologized for his actions. He underscored the fact that he was just assisting his wife who is scheduled to have an operation. But for public officials, would this be reason enough when in fact he vowed not just to serve his family but the entire country? Was he overwhelmed by the emotion of becoming a father that he forgot that he is supposed to stay at home after learning that he was exposed to a meeting with an infected official on March 11?

Sean (2010) said: We all have emotions. It is something that is innate and intentionally designed for us. Emotions are very powerful and we have to be mindful of it. It is because our emotions are very powerful decision-influencers.

Theorists commonly assume that people’s attitudes and judgments reflect information about the object of judgment. But people’s evaluations also reflect information from their own affective reactions. In social situations, for example, the crucial factor in our evaluation of other people is often the feelings that they elicit in us. However, knowing and feeling are tightly linked, and disentangling them requires methods by which affect can be varied independently of belief.

We can be enveloped with anxiety or excitement and succumb to them without confronting evaluative judgment on what to do. This is the time when we can consider that emotions are dangerous when they take over our judgment.

Observations, along with a great number of experimental results, suggest that emotion and behavior may be linked in at least two ways that can be described as reflective and impulsive. In a more systematic fashion, the two psychological mechanisms have been described in the context of the Reflective-Impulsive Model (Strack and Deutsch, 2004, 2015), which provides a conceptual orientation for the reported research.

Thus, Senator Koko acted out impulsively forgetting that he was on self-quarantine. The alibi of telling the people that he did not know that he was infected cannot be accepted since he was well-informed that his companions during the March 11 meeting did their own ways of distancing themselves from others. He was overwhelmed by his emotions he forgot to perform responsible actions for the public and the country.

Nicole-Ann C. Lagrimas of GMA News mentioned that the Department of Justice (DOJ) will not investigate Senator Aquilino "Koko" Pimentel III for his alleged breach of home quarantine protocol unless it receives a complaint, Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra said on Wednesday night. Guevarra said the DOJ would "temper" the law with compassion.

"As I have said before, during abnormal times like these, when people are prone to commit mistakes or violations of the law, the DOJ will temper the rigor of the law with human compassion," Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra said in a message to reporters.

Critics then posed this question: Would the law be considerate to the poor as well? Others even juxtaposed the actions of the senator and the common Filipino who is being tasked to do community service by being caught during curfew hours. They implicate inequality among the powerful and the poor.

Which leads us to the conclusion: In these abnormal times, we must do what is considered as NOMAL by continuously examining the actions that we do regardless of what we feel.