Election truths

We go to the polls once more in May. Will it be another useless exercise?

My memories of political exercises go back to my grade-school days in the town of Malabon, where my father--a prewar mayor of that small town--held informal caucuses with political allies in his gasoline station located right in the middle of the main street leading to the municipal building, only a few steps from the town market, the imposing church of San Bartolome, and the church-attached premier Catholic diocesan school.

My father was a loyal card-bearing member of the Nacionalista Party--so loyal governors and congressmen came to his table at fiesta time and sent huge wreaths for his wake--at a time when national politics was a battle between only two political parties, each one with its own pronounced political platform and its uncorrupted political followers.

Elections were exciting then, not for the violence and the cheating that are de rigueur these days, but for the atmosphere of total political involvement and commitment to a party and its candidates, both on the national and local levels.

After each election, the town would settle down, the politicians content to take a backseat as the real life of the small town took over again. Malabon's great fortunes were founded not on politics, but on business. Politics was only a necessary adjunct to the interisland businesses that provided the town with its legendary millionaires and their legendary family names.

If there were any politics pursued in between elections, which were held every four years, it was always quiet spadework--building up membership, manning the ramparts, working the streets and the houses to ensure the votes came in at the next election.

Town-wide, in those days, voters knew who to vote for, what their qualifications were, what records they brought with them. These days, there is none of that kind of in-your-face familiarity. Rumors abound everywhere about everybody, everybody denies every damaging or unflattering story, nobody knows the truth, nobody tells the truth.

Yes, all these in Malabon, now a city. Its politics, like the rest of the country's politics today, has gone big, strident, questionable, violent. It is no longer a small town.

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Editorial, The Evening Paper
Issue of 8 May 1995

Cast your vote for the good...

For the few remaining hours left to those who have not yet cast their votes, let them be worthwhile hours. Hours of pitiless cross-examination--of the candidates, of their qualifications, of the voters' goals, of this election's end-goals.

There are few givens that the Filipino electorate can start from.

We are a country that has been left behind by time, by contemporary events, by progress, by other developing countries. If we want to catch up, we have to work double-time, even triple-time.

Even then, we may not catch up. And catching up, remember, is only reaching our neighbors' level as of today. While we are catching up, they are already moving ahead.

We lost close to 20 years, remember?

As voters who still have to make it to the polls take the rest of the afternoon to cast their votes, and as those who have already cast their votes spend the rest of the day following the results of today's elections, let those results reflect a people's fervent prayer for grace, truth, wisdom, and deliverance.

The lessons of the past have not been so long ago that we can no longer remember them, nor so immaterial that we do not need to remember them.

They are, in fact, so memorable that we can state and restate them in words of one syllable: Let the good reign, and the bad lose.

Let those who have the interests of the people and the country in their hearts triumph, and those who have only their own personal interests, only their own wallets in their political agendas, fall by the wayside.

To defeat the second, we have to make sure that we recognize the first.

Before those of us who have already voted even made it to the polling places, they should have thoroughly studied all the candidates for national and local offices, gone over their backgrounds and experiences with a fine-toothed comb, and determined which ones could best contribute to the country's catch-up efforts.

There are candidates who talk a lot of sense but really do nothing; their records will prove they spent the past years in office or out of it doing just that: talking.

On the other hand, there are candidates whose words may falter but whose deeds are direct and purposeful. Are those deeds focused on the people, the improvement of community and society? Or are the actions inward-looking, directed toward their own personal aggrandizement and not the people's?

We have always thought that, shorn of emotion and prejudice, bereft of personal attachment or gain, each and every thinking voter will not find the choice between various candidates such a difficult task.

Each candidate brings with him a composite biodata, so to speak, a picture of his past that will guide us in making an educated judgment of his present and future--and therefore of his constituents' present and future.

Studying that composite, complete picture of each candidate's past is the best technique for intelligent voting.

...and protect it

But the problem extends beyond casting your vote at your polling booth (if you are lucky enough to find it). As every election enthusiast is fond of warning, "Your responsibility does not end with your vote."

In fact, the hours after the polling booths close are even more critical hours. Those are the hours that separate the innocent from the depraved.

Has it not become a visual cliché of Philippine elections, those photographs of civilians of various stripes protecting ballot boxes at risk to their lives, to defend the rightful will of the electorate?

As the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting declared over a radio program yesterday, there are many more processes that follow between the casting of a ballot and the recognition of the rightful winners of an election. In fact, it may even happen that the rightful winners never get to sit and serve. This is no longer an oddity in Philippine politics.

Unfortunately, this is often the hardest part of the voting exercise, the one that demands the greatest devotion and persistence.

Guarding the faithful reflection of one's political decision demands that Filipino voters give a little more of their time to policing the exercise.

We hear of the increasing number of religious, social, and civic organizations who are getting involved in post-poll activities, and we are glad. We wish more of the silent majority will join these organizations.

But each Filipino voter should also be sure that these organizations do not have political agendas of their own, that they do not have political favorites.

That is another task that devolves to each individual voter. For ultimately, each Filipino's vote is his own. It is his to cast--and his to protect.

-- NBT

'Clean and green'

I love going to the countryside. To me, the country is home to the two coolest hues in the spectrum of color: blue and green.

The blue of the skies, at times clear and brilliant, at other times greyish and forbidding. The blue-green of water, burbling in brooks and streams, singing in rivers, lapping against sand, impenetrable in lakes, frothing angry or playful from beaches overlooking the infinite. The blue-green of mountains, majestic in the distance, a reminder of scenes and sights of my past, now permanently alive only in my mind's eye, sentimental places and memories already beyond revisiting. The green of forests and trees, of meadows and gardens, of potted plants and tiny leaves.

Since the end of my journalistic career allowed me to encourage my creative ambitions, I traveled the nooks and crannies of the serene towns and barrios of the provinces to the south of Metro Manila--Quezon, Batangas, Laguna.

As I drove away from the towns to the rural areas and wildernesses of this region, I would imprint in my mind the images of idyllic country life: old-style farmhouses ringed by mango and coconut trees, with the occasional carabao or horse or even free-range chickens lazing about, smoke billowing from outhouses; huge plantations protected by stone walls from the streets, with only their rooftops visible through heavy canopies of trees; unprofessionally but heartily landscaped gardens surrounding schoolhouses lying motionless in the sun. And always--always!--water in rivers and streams, flowing down from hills and mountains through irrigation canals to join up with the lake and the sea beyond.

In these places, "cool and green" continues to be an appropriate description. But no longer in Metro Manila or in other highly urbanized localities, where buildings eat up parks, centuries-old trees are cut, and squatters gleefully pollute waterways with the wastes of their miserable existence--and all with government approval!

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Editorial, The Evening Paper
Issue of 14 November 1995

The giggles from youngsters watching the television coverage of a recently concluded beauty contest, held in a mountain resort up north, were all too audible when one contestant came up with her "clean and green" impression of the Philippines. She must have picked up the phrase, quite automatically, from intermittent posters on zigzagging routes to the resort, or along the mountain city's roadways, totally unaware of the fact that the Philippines, whether on the ground or from the air, has long ceased to be clean and green. In fact, even the mountain resort where the beauty contest was held had long ago turned into pathetic brown.

Nor is Metro Manila looking any younger and crisper. It looks, to be kind about it, decidedly old and faded. A tourist traveling down Metro Manila streets is bound to bring home with him contrasting images of the Filipino people's respect, or lack of, for his environment.

On the one hand, you can look out from Makati's high-rise buildings and see stretches of green parks and tree-shaded thoroughfares, including parts of Gil Puyat Avenue and Paseo de Roxas. Outside Makati, one can still find tree-shaded streets in older communities like San Juan and Mandaluyong. Nor should we forget the welcome canopy of age-old trees, their branches joined, over the streets of New Manila.

On the other hand, the concrete ribbons in the Cubao commercial district are not only gray and ugly, but also dirty and smelly. Even the celebrated flyovers, at their birth sprouting fully landscaped crawl and pedestrian spaces at EDSA level, have already lost much of their green to dust, smog and human neglect.

And the center island of Pasig's Ortigas Avenue Extension from near the Meralco Building to E. Rodriguez Avenue, which had gone to weed but was still home to fully grown though scraggly trees, has now been torn out--with the approval of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, we were adequately warned--and is being cemented to provide more road space for cars. What is being constructed right at the center is a very narrow ledge made of hollow blocks. Can we at least look forward to a future glimpse of green somewhere along this perennially traffic-clogged stretch?

Only last week, certain comments of the controversial, newly installed congressional representative from the first district of Leyte were played up in the newspapers, including her quip about Mrs. Amelita Ramos's clean and green program. We can say all things about the former first lady (Imelda Marcos), but one thing we must acknowledge is the fact that when she did, she went into the cleaning and greening of Metro Manila as if it were her life's mission--to the point of being ridiculed for creating Potemkin villages to hide the ugliness and poverty of real life.

There must be a middle ground somewhere--and a person who can lead us in mining the rich deposit of ecological concern and aesthetic commitment among the residents of Metro Manila. Sometimes, all it needs is somebody to concentrate on the job instead of taking it on as one more adjunct to an already long string of official duties and responsibilities.

Who does not dream of a really clean and green Metro Manila?

-- NBT