Oh, there’s an election coming up? I know, I apologize for my govern-mental block but for the past few years, it’s been so much easier to just skip the headlines and flip straight to Ricky Lo’s “Body Talk.” It sure beats having to get grim updates on the frustratingly un-funny sketch show that is Everybody Hates Gloria.
It’s been what, eight years or so since Her Moley-est climbed up the presidential pedestal and I know as much about my country’s political news as I do about what’s going on in that series of convoluted events, Lost.
Voting Ignorance Off Of These Islands
But we’ve got about a year before The Election, apparently. Around 12 months before we visually gag over candidates’ mugs wheat-pasted over tree trunks, “Wanted: Tubero” signs, and one another. Before we’re well acquainted with The Uncanny Presidentiables, a new group of super-promisers with tentative aliases like Mr. Padyak, Mr. Sipag at Tiyaga, and, uh, Jo-nognog. And before my dad lays the responsibility on thick with his lofty speech on the need to cast that ballot. “It’s the most important thing you can do now as a Filipino,” he told me over the phone in ’07, when he tried to get me to drive up to our town’s Comelec camp to get a new cast of self-absorbed pinheads in My Super Sweet Senate — where life’s an extravagant party for whoever’s elected.
Yet after I put the phone down, I remained where I was, sitting on my ass and forging on with my Laguna Beach marathon. I knew he was right, of course, but disinterest outweighed the call of duty. Or maybe it was just powerlessness — the knot in my stomach that indicated nausea towards the lost cause of Philippine government, which was certainly different from the lump of nationalistic emotion lodged in my throat when the ousting of Erap seemed like a glorious beginning to an age of Filipino enlightenment.
That wasn’t the case, obviously. But I’ll be the last person to bitch about where our leaders, the system, the masses, or whoever went wrong. I can’t point the finger if its tip hadn’t been drizzled with indelible ink in the first place. At best, I’m a silent spectator — muzzled by forfeiting that “most important” choice for change; more ignorant and even more powerless than I was on the day I decided I still wanted this country to be a punch line in US sitcoms. ‘Cause, really, if you don’t vote, you’re practically one of those people resigned to watching this motherland burn.
Primer And Reason
But for all those people who’d much rather fondle their remote controls on Election Day (that’s May 10) ‘cause buying into the vote is no match to the people who actually buy votes, the can-and-did-acy that culminated in the US last November should be a reminder of the change we can be capable of. Sure, our decisions will lie between those who steal and those who steal more rather than Republicans and Democrats, but along with the prospect of choosing the lesser evil, it’ll be the noble act of choosing as well as we can that spells out our own version of hope. I mean, he can represent us in the ring and all, but the House of Representatives being spared from a Congressman Pacquiao should say something about the steady refinement of voters in this country.
It all begins with education, anyway, so in a bid to equip the sunken vote (the could-care-less citizenry out there — or those who could be potentially swung by P150 and a KFC meal) for 2010, I’ve resolved to create a premature political primer of sorts. Anything can happen in a year (like candidates keeling over and dying on us, as we’ve witnessed), but at least by then, you’ll know whose name (no aliases, please) to write on that ballot. Anything to get you off your ass, come Election Day.