Siftings
A total sweep of the heart! (1)
Almost all the votes are in. The people have chosen. All the efforts to make these semi-automated national elections clean have paid off – partially, because there are complaints and signs of discrepancies due to computer glitzes, human error, etc. Or due to human greed?
Because the most telling election fraud at this time is, Vote Buying. Not dagdag-bawas, not hakot, not intimidation. But hard cash in the amount of 1,500.00 to 2000 pesos in crisp bills and neat envelopes distributed by barangay kapitans to voters. But chances are, voters took the money and voted for their choices, just the same. Despite rumors that recipients got only P500 and not the whole amount intended for them as listed down in “notebooks.” Really!
Anyway, our kasimanwas reason out to their consciences, that money belongs to them, mga taong bayan. Tax payer’s money given out as government funds and used to pay for our votes to put politicians of our choice in the positions where they can hopefully render us their greatest service. Or so we dreamfully suppose, to the detriment of our good moral senses.
This has been the most satisfying elections I have ever participated in, in the last two decades, because my candidates won, except for one veep and the majority of my senatoriables. In the last presidential elections, my presidential candidate, Sen. Raul Rocco, lost–and subsequently lost his fight with prostate cancer. Before that, Ramon Mitra lost to Erap. But before that, FVR won, because he had Cory’s annointment and I voted for him as EDSA hero amd Cory’s defender from the coups.
But to my mind, this last presidential election campaign can be categorized into 3: a campaign for the stomach, one for the mind; and one for the heart.
Food for the stomach of the poor was Eraps’ ploy as well as Villar’s. Food for the mind, the intellect – that was Gibo’s turf, being a Law graduate who topped the bar exams. But food for the heart? This was Noynoy’s realm. A veritable epic of emotional sweep and grandeur is his legacy from his parents.
Cory’s legacy of honesty and disinterested public service in answer to a call for clean leadership and clear democratic rule from her countrymen in a time when one-man rule was threatening to inundate the country in cases of desaparecidos, cronyism and crony economic policies, ill-gotten wealth which by now are amassing interest in foreign banks running to trillions of dollars, and which indeed can pull this country of 80 million out of the quagmires of poverty and third world conditions.
Ninoy’s legacy was one of devoted, idealistic, committed public service. Initially fueled by juvenile ambition and the desire to succeed, this devotion to public service turned in time and through circumstances, into a quest, not for power, but for a purer way to save his countrymen from the abuses of a dictator rendered numb and practically inutile by the debilitating effects of his diseases (Kidney failure and lupus), by too much absolute power, and by sycophantic cordon sanitaire.
Back then, the dictator Marcos walked with the powerful men of the world. But Time and Mortality has overtaken them, like Shelley’s powerful King Ozymandias whose monument’s head was found buried in the sand: symbol of the mortality of power. Consider Ronald Reagan, the leader of the world’s no.1 superpower, now dead; but before he died, reduced to a quivering mass of forgetfulness by Alzheimer’s. The Shah Reza Pahlevi, King and Emperor of the Persians, to whose coronation in Teheran Marcos and Imelda went; the Shah was toppled by a religious revolution and died in ignominious exile, while his heir and supporters dream of a return to power that will never happen. The Rumanian President and his wife who came to a state visit was assassinated in a coup d’etat which could have been Marcos’ fate had not the US sent helicopters to save him and his family and bring them into exile in Hawaii, where he subsequently died. And when one reviews the above chain of events, one’s eyes bulge in horror at the cliched denouement: Crime does not pay. The wages of sin overtakes the sinner, which are the bitter fruits of abuse of power. When a man has reached the very top of the very top, there is no way but down: the way of the world. The way of all flesh. The cyclic nature of existence: birth and growth, and maturity and decline, death and annihilation. Dust to dust returneth, to become one with nature. The rise and fall, ascension and decline. Awakening, sleep, and a forgetting.
Meanwhile, Noynoy’s campaign held a promise which a large chunk of the Filipino population wants to see realized. You see, the sheer drama of his family’s life has taken over our hearts, and has overtaken our capacity to doubt, to look at everything through a veil of skepticism.
We want emotion to rush over our bodies and ignite our energies to make this nation get out of the morass of helplessness, inaction, of the paralysis of disability, unbelief, non-belief – that the evil influences of corruption and dishonesty and in-your-face greed has wielded in the echelons of authority and in the rank and file of government functionaries. We need to get out of the unhealthy swamps of corruption and their deadly exhalations before we are totally brought down and swallowed, like the House of Usher in Edgar Allan Poe’s masterpiece of horror. (To be continued tomorrow)
