Go goes ballistic

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama won in an election Tuesday! What a headline this would have made – except that the election was held at the Bulong Pulungan (media forum) at Sofitel Hotel the other day. Some media persons and regular attendees voted 14-6 in favor of Obama at the mock election held Tuesday.

The exciting exercise was held after US Embassy first secretary and press attaché Rebecca Brown Thompson explained the electoral process in the American elections. With the primaries and general elections, plus the counting of votes through the electoral colleges, it’s likely that cheating in the polls is not committed. “We try to minimize it,” said Ms. Thompson, who said the American election process is not perfect, and smiled when told about cheating being committed in the Philippine national and local elections.

Filipinos do not vote in the US elections, but we are affected by the policies of the party in power in the US Congress. For example, under Republican President Bush, the supply of artificial contraceptives for the Philippine reproductive health and family planning program has been stopped. I expect that with Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s position – which I was only told about – of not favoring sex education in the schools, and supporting the Bush administration’s stance on family planning, the Philippine population management program is going to suffer further, what with the clerics (who don’t know a thing about the dangers of unplanned pregnancy) insisting only that natural family planning methods should be used by couples, and no condom, please.        

Many people are ecstatic over the choice of Palin as the Republican vice-presidential candidate. She may be good, she may be bright, she may be a good administrator of the state of Alaska, but maybe, from my stand, she will have to learn a lot from her advisers to be able to address the US national media to whom she does not want, just yet, to give interviews, on her views on foreign policy, the Iraq war, the economic recession in the US, etc. But I’m not a voter, so let the American voters decide if she’s fit for the presidency, which is just a breath away from the vice-presidency.

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Early last month, I wrote about the ongoing saga of self-styled textbook critic Antonio Calipjo Go in connection with his tiff with some textbook publishers and the Department of Education that has led to a criminal case filed against him for “destroying the good name and reputation” of one of the book companies he had dealt with.

Let me refresh your memory about the issue(s) about which Mr. Go who is a full-time employee of the Marian School of Quezon City as academic supervisor. Go hit the headlines when he revealed several errors he had found while going through some textbooks being used in public schools. He went on to denounce not only the publishers but even the DepEd for laxity – and even connivance – in allowing the supposedly error-filled books to be used by students.

Go’s crusade hit a homer. He initially found support among alarmed parents, civic organizations and the media, myself included. However, things took a dramatic turnaround when items began to come out about Go’s way of dealing with “erring” publishers. The reports centered on Go’s allegedly threatening to expose in media the errors and inaccuracies he had found in the books unless the publishers concerned agreed to give him an “editing fee” of P100,000.

When these reports came out in the open at the same time that the DepEd was also lambasting Go for his wild accusation of a possible collusion between the department and textbook publishers, media people suddenly found the heretofore high-profile Go difficult to track down. The only time his name popped up again was when a letter from him was published in a broadsheet where he issued a de facto apology and retraction for his statement linking the DepEd to some publishers on the matter of the supposed errors.

Well, lo and behold, Go got out of his hole around 10 days ago to attend the start of court proceedings on the criminal complaint filed against him at the Quezon City Hall of Justice. Instead of trying to downplay the hearing and thus avoid media’s probing eyes, what do you know – Go raised a ruckus when he angrily accosted a photographer of another newspaper and tried to grab the camera from the shocked lensman who was luckily able to parry Go’s attack and run away.

What’s gotten into Go? Is that irrational behavior his way of getting back into the limelight? Weird.

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Nandy Pacheco, founder of Ang Kapatiran Party, has an answer to the question, “Why Are We Where We Are?” And his answer is not a happy one – for good reason. Nandy starts out by recalling the 1997 Pastoral Exhortation on Philippine Politics by the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, which said: “If we are what we are today – a country with a great number of poor and powerless people – one reason is the way we have allowed politics to be debased and prostituted to the lowest level it is in now.”

Today, 11 years after that exhortation, Nandy describes the Philippine political situation as having “gone from bad to worse.”

He says “several political cancer cells have to be excised. These include “a lack of understanding of what politics is all about; an absence of responsible and accountable political parties, and a loss of the sense of the common good.”

He continues: “Politics are not necessarily dirty. They can be good. But bad politicians defile them and the people allow it. Politics have a moral dimension which can lead us either to good or evil.”

Pope Benedict XVI, according to Nandy, says a just society “must be the achievement of politics, not of the Church. The direct duty to work for a just ordering of society is proper to the lay faithful.”

The whole trouble is that voters don’t bother to look into the moral character of the candidates or the political platforms of the parties, says Nandy. “Voters do not realize that voting is a creative act of participating in the building of a just and civil society.”

“We would do well to remember the moral principle that men individually are responsible for what they make of themselves but collectively they are responsible for the world in which they live.”

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