Starting too early

Oh no! It has started; the season of perdition. Seven months before the start of the official campaign period, the wanna-be candidates are sounding their gongs and jockeying for position in the spotlight – posturing, playing coy, making pronouncements, negotiating perhaps for possible advantages. And it is sickening, disgusting, puke-able, ridiculous, ludicrous.

Politics is a disease, like an infection that is never totally gotten rid of. For a brief period after an election, it lies low, its ugly head tucked under its wing. But it’s still there, festering. And in no time – we only have three years between elections – there it is again, resurrected, with renewed strength, noisier and uglier than ever.

Unfortunately there isn’t another better way to choose our leaders, so we have to live with elections. And we have to live too with the bozos and buffoons, the basterds and bandits who preen and present themselves as candidates, saviors who hold the solution to all our problems.

My pastor candidly admitted a couple of Sundays ago that he did not vote in the last elections because he was so frustrated that he practically gave up, saying it was hopeless and that his vote would be useless anyway. He has apparently since changed his mind, for he has been encouraging us to get registered and go out and vote next May, to not give up on the country.

Disgusted as I am with all these politicians, I am strongly pro-vote – I firmly believe all of us who are eligible must vote, if only to do what we can to keep the worst of the crooks out of government. I believe too that if you don’t vote, you don’t have the right to criticize or complain. (I want to take it further and say that if you don’t pay taxes you shouldn’t be complaining either.)

I say Bravo! to the new Comelec chairman and his team for thinking out of the box for ways to get voters to straighten out their registration – i.e., to get their biometrics done – so that they can vote. Now there’s an online poll regarding voting in malls; you can have your say by accessing http://www.electionsphl.com/participate/mall-voting.

I’m happy to say I have my biometrically correct voter’s ID – even though the photo on the ID has me looking worse than the one who got kicked out of the “Survivor” reality series. One of these fine days I’m herding the rest of my family to our local Comelec office to get their bio done so they can boto. Now who we will boto for is something we will have to discuss at length – after the dust storm has settled and who will run for what is sorted out and the bozos have filed their certificates of candidacy.

It is a pretty dismal view I hold of our electoral exercise, but it is a result of all the reports I have to read day in and day out about who is running, or not, or maybe, and how everything is politically motivated. And, unfortunately, from here on in, I guess every other thing will, indeed, be politically motivated.