Meaningful elections

As if double whammies like Gloria and Hambalos were not enough, the country invites yet a third deluge — baranganic and youth elections which flood the country with more mindless rhetoric, cluttersome posters and presposterous (sic) politicians. Until such time as the public learns to appreciate, demand and organize for meaningful elections, these exercises will fail to provide the country with the leaders it needs to cope with its increasingly stressful challenges. In lieu of balikatan-oriented public servants, Philippine elections will continue producing mostly balikatin officials — those electoral winners who upon assuming office become predatory wards of the very public they vow so eloquently in their campaigns to serve.

Textbooks in democratic governance stress the need for regular, clean and credible elections. While these are indeed good features of any electoral process, they unfortunately ignore the sine qua non of all meaningful elections — the civic spirit and the quality of mind of those who vote as well as those who are voted for.

Whatever their age and socioeconomic background, people cannot contribute much to having meaningful elections unless they nurture a sense of community and its overall interests. Most people who participate in Philippine elections are self-oriented and reflect the vaguest idea of a common interest, a shared purpose or layunin conjoining all voters and candidates.

This communal idea does not limit itself to the equitable sharing of opportunities and resources within the community. As a matter of fact, in the Philippine setting, the critical area may be more in the equitable partition of social responsibilities and communal costs and — perhaps representing the most difficult cultural challenge of all for Filipinos – the willful and equitable application of deserved penalties to those who wrong the community as a whole. (In Dante’s Inferno, the worst place in hell is reserved for those who betray their own people. One is tempted to furnish Dante with a list of contemporary Filipinos who deserve to join this distinguished company of traitors. Many won brilliantly in many nefarious elections this country conducted in the last fifty years.)

The other thing making for truly meaningful elections is the quality of mind candidates and voters generally share. One does not really speak here of the "beautiful mind" one associates with the Nobelist Nash or his truly more gifted wife. Neither does one get hung up on impressive IQs that may project people as MENSA candidates. Ordinary people can and must have quality minds before they make popular elections serve democratic interests. They can and must develop the faculty to look into and see beyond what is often manipulatively said or written, understand figures and figure out the legitimate configurations that those who play around with figures may deliberately suppress. A high-quality mind automatically examines, unravels and often purposively modifies the many cloaks that everyday life wears and invites an intelligent enough public to try.

The basic institutions of Philippine society have not done much to nurture quality minds among the citizenry. Neither the formal eductional system nor the various civil institutions in this country had worked to overcome superficial, superstitious, illogical and unstrategic thinking. In the inevitable process of socializing the Filipino, Philippine institutions have unfortunately conspired to discourage logical reason, empirical science, historical transparency and long-term perspectives. It will take a while before these defects are finally corrected. And even as political will be necessary to start the process of correction, political willfulness will not be enough. Willfulness will have to be exercised not only by the institutions of political governance but by all structures concerned with socialization in Philippine society, from that of the family, to those of the schools, churches, media, the private sector and many others.

In the interim, while the national infirmities persist, the frequency of Philippine elections might be minimized. To save much on time, to conserve scarce resources direly needed by so many poor Filipinos and perhaps also to have more fairness in the selection of leaders and public officials in this country, another system other than vacuous and often violent elections could be tried. Every Filipino might be given an exclusive ID number. Then PAGCOR or a similar agency could identify who would be president as well as who would be a Barangay Kagawad through a national lottery.

One thing for sure. This proposed system cannot possibly mess up the country as much as elections across the years had.