EDITORIAL - Mother of all problems

In these elections and in elections past, going to as far back as anyone can remember, candidates for whatever positions in government have been titillating the public with solutions to every conceivable problem.

It seems that there are as many problems to solve as there are candidates. To be sure, there are candidates who indeed have a fair chance to addressing their problems of choice. But for the most part, most candidates are merely paying lip service to the electorate.

The funny thing is, either the electorate does not know any better, or it is simply too weary to point out the obvious. At any rate, the collective leg of the nation gets pulled, and nobody gives a damn.

And because nobody gives a damn, the country will proceed on its vicious cycle of endless elections, with nothing ever getting solved, and the country never succeeding in spinning out of the cycle to at least veer off to a different direction.

The uncanny thing about the lot of Filipinos is that, off all the problems enumerated during the elections, whether real or imagined, there is one that has never merited any attention or even the slightest mention.

That problem is called hypocrisy. And the reason why the problem of hypocrisy seems so unmentionable is because almost everybody is guilty of it, not just the candidates. No pot calls the kettle black more frequently and aggressively than in this country.

Forget the candidates for a while as they understandably have to employ every means to get elected. Focus instead on those who espouse advocacies that seem to bathe them in a glow of superior light.

For instance, there is nothing wrong in advocating for the ideal political environment in which to elect our leaders -- clean, fair and honest elections, moral choices, no vote-buying, no violence -- except that these advocacies never seem to take reality into account.

Some of those who demand heavenly conduct of both politicians and the public are not exactly paragons of virtue themselves. Clean politics is not the appropriate advocacy for those who have no qualms accepting anything from politicians.