BY BORDI JAEN
WE FILIPINOS truly have some of the wildest elections in the world, no? It can be described as anything but tame.
I don’t know if we’ve yet to see just how wild (and dangerous) our elections can get. From custom comic books, burgers and even sneakers, the magnitude of just how creative our politicians get to woo our votes shows just how important they are.
Election times are not just wild because of how the candidates campaign. The verbal attacks between each camp’s supporters are just as if not wilder. Oh, pardon me. Such happenings are not limited to verbal tossings pala. We’ve heard of fights and breakups between families, friends and lovers.
On the bright side, we now have a lot more people voting than ever before. However, the toxicity is something. More often than not, the heat of the elections moves people to monstrous words and actions. Politics is mucky on many levels.
This can be understood. Votes are important because they determine the elections. The elections determine the fate of the country for the next three to six years (and the ripples are felt even in the coming decades). Hence, votes are important for the country.
Given this, why are there people who choose to simply not vote? What is the excuse?
It is heartbreaking to see individuals throw away their votes. Perhaps it seems hopeless? Perhaps they think that their one vote won’t even change anything.
Just as terrible is the habit of throwing votes to the most good-looking candidates or the ones good in dancing budots. Our ancestors must be flipping in their graves at this abomination! Our right to vote was reaped by the toils of the past and blood of the many. Every vote counts because apathy is not a one0time, one0person occurrence but a general trend, a movement if you will. It’s like throwing trash that ends up in the drainage. It seems like no one gets harmed. After all, what can one measly candy wrapper do, right?
However, when it becomes a general trend for people to throw trash on that drainage, it eventually piles and clogs the drainage then floods the area, causing dangerous diseases to proliferate and make misery on the people living or walking by.
Thankfully, there are people out there who take the initiative to raise awareness about the importance of voting on the grassroots movement. The only way to counter a bad trend is by starting a good one and it truly gladdens for the bold and stout-hearted to eliminate the disease of voter apathy.
Equally condemnable are the virtue-signaling, puritanical condemners. It’s so easy to ridicule people who are swayed by daft pseudo-knowledge because we are privileged enough to be educated at great educational institutions. We have time to research the facts. We have time to change our opinions. It’s so easy to for us to read figures of how people sell their votes for practically loose change because to us what seems like loose change is already a sizeable windfall to others.
Can it be truly said that, if we were in their shoes of tatters and holes, such a temptation would still be resistible? It’s easy to us to put our candidates on a pedestal saying that this one is the best because of A, B, C, and D. That this one will truly change the country for the better. Big whoop.
Who are we kidding? Do we really think it’s such an impactful message to those people who’ve lived in three to six administrations cloaked in oppression and misery?
Don’t get me wrong. I want the most qualified and principled candidate to score. However, in our fight for the righteous cause, let us remember that what we fight is the system and its true perpetrators. In our quest for what is right, demeaning others is not the way no matter how tempting it may seem. You don’t convince someone by calling them stupid and hurting their ego. If anything, it just feeds their cognitive dissonance.
Would you buy insurance from an agent who says verbatim, “You’re doing a stupid thing by not buying our insurance product!”?
In the end, why do we fight? The people are why we fight. The people who are not the perpetrators, but the victim of a system so hopelessly broken that so many of our countrymen see either escaping it as the only possible of a better life or the voting of a Judas cloaked as a messiah. Justice is blind. Righteousness is not.
In our finding, fighting, and moving for our means, whichever side one may be at, may we remember the great end to which we should strive for ultimately: the future of our Fatherland./PN
