It's Election Time Again

Guess what, it’s election time again. Ideally, the election time means a fresh start, a development from previous projects, programs and positions that didn’t work, and most of all, another exercise of democracy for the Philippine people. NOT. Yeaaaah, right.

Today, election in the Philippines just turns into one big variety show. It’s like this: we all know we’re going to see and hear a lot of crap from politicians, we roll our eyes, we try our best to make the most out of our choices, we vote anyway, we wait for the results (which, by the way, is another teleserye unfolding) and if we realize we get cheated on, we shrug it off by virtue of half-expectations. If that’s not sad, I don’t know what is.

But that’s not everything. Here are other common election patterns that really tick me off:

Cheap Techniques

There are senatoriables that appear in human interest story-based TV shows (like Rated K), plaster their names on Christmas, New Year, Valentine’s Day greetings, and others, in a variety of media that appeal to Classes C-E, plus mainstream celebrities. It’s disgusting. But this system has been around for a very long time so I’m betting it works. Sigh.

Media Dirt

Then there are writers, photographers and random PR people who take care of a politician’s PR. Nothing against the honest ones who are discriminating about the projects they take. Those that when they know a certain campaign is crap, misleading, they would automatically drop it. To be fair, there are “clean” projects too. Like merely writing copies for their speeches, flyers and proofreading. However, there are others who are completely selling out to “the big money” and forget the main purpose of journalism.

I-don’t-get-you Partylists

Partylists. I don’t really get them. For the nth time, if all our politicians were just doing their jobs, from the President to the Barangay Captain, then there wouldn’t be people/ citizens who are left behind. Then we won’t need Party Lists, right? We have a partylist for women, like Gabriela. My thoughts: SERIOUSLY? Women? Minority? That’s more than half the entire electorate. If we need to have a partylist for that, what the hell do our politicians do all day?! Aside from that, there are hundreds of party lists that have weird advocacies, some are too obscure, some are redundant, and others, abstract. All I can do is shake my head.

It’s exhausting, right? At the end of the day, most of us still feel like the government is not taking care of us as much as we deserve to be taken cared of. Sigh. Let me go back to reading poetry.