Insights
Paradoxical culture
In our illusionary and unholy democracy it is a sacrilege to abdicate the right to vote. Giving up one's opportunity to decide who will govern, or more realistically who will avariciously rule the country, intentionally missing out on the few twisted pleasures of an impoverished life is totally unbearable to the vast majority.
When fraudulence annihilates even a semblance of democracy; when the only way to secure the education of a busload of children is to hold them as hostages with grenade and Uzi in hand, it's safe to say that the acquiescent and apathetic within our impoverished midst should be kicked in the ass for such a state of affairs.
With a grave legacy of blackmail and deceit, the ruling authorities condemns the so-called "Prank Terrorism" of Jun Ducat and viciously vows to throw the book including the governmentally overpriced bookshelf to the "starved for attention" hostage-taker who seems to gain in growing intensity the deep sympathies of his victims' next of kin, from great grandmother to the long lost godfather who lives and rakes in grinding poverty-and without their benefactor cum hostage taker- perpetual misery.
Lingering loudly in our hearing-impaired ears brought about by skipped meals and imaginary abdominal fills in this economically and morally famished land of ours, was the promise of scoundrels monkeying for public office during the last elections. Unhindered public services, or more appositely, infrequent peculiarities of rationed water, insalubrious food, and provisionally undemolished housing would continue unhampered only if, and that's the unpalatable "if", the ruling authorities stays in power. Now who's the hostage- taker, who's the incorrigible blackmailer?
Entitlements that should benefit the populace is held hostage by venomous patronage, reducing the sublime social contract to mere ridicule, and subjecting the citizenry to an infantile state, wherein the government acts as the lascivious parent dangling doles to impose absolute control.
Provoked with a political battlefield besieged by scoundrels whom we want desperately to be exterminated, hoping that they would devour each other in one of the most defining political combat of the 21st century, annihilating their venal candidacies into internecine destruction; it is one thing however to want or wish for such a blessed destruction from occurring, to actually participating and precipitating its much yearned for realization.
The uncommon idealism of Zosimo Jesus Paredes II, Martin D. Bautista and Adrian O. Sison, the senatorial candidates (some would say electorally suicidal, albeit profoundly worthy candidates) of the Ang Kapatiran Party in the midst of common cynicism is a call to arms for those who keep on whining for things to change, childishly crying in vain rather than scuffling and scrounging to churn out a difference (Kick off by slam-dunking at www.angkapatiran.org ). Serving as an indictment to the society's groveling apathy to patronage politics which keeps on amassing patrons up to this day, the worthy objective of the party is to present a decent alternative to the indecencies of Team Unity and the Genuine Opposition.
With an uncompromising soldier condemning the shameless vassalage of the ruling authorities to the United States, a lawyer whose righteousness and legal acumen serves as a judicial shield to his penniless clients, an established doctor in the United States facing the hurricane of Filipino Diaspora head-on, virtuously returning to serve his country.
Weirdly enough, through the sheer contradictions of our paradoxical culture we keep on siding with the feudalistic scoundrels whom we see knocking at the front of our dilapidated doors during our so-called
elections, thinking that by aiding and abetting them our community will reap benefits come victory time, only to be raped and robbed of our civil rights.
When the statesman Raul Roco presented himself as an alternative to avarice and greed he was disdained by the servile voter as naïve, perceived as an individual unlikely to win, for he had no political machinery to speak of. Our culture never considered, even for a moment to shun its debilitating paradoxes, when we rejected the sound notion that a principled candidate may not have the obscene wherewithal of the corrupt, that a noble individual like Roco was also freed from vested interest and the depraved machination of the political establishment.
How far are we willing to go in emancipating ourselves from the dehumanizing clutches of feudalism, conspicuously embedded in our political system? The excruciating truth can be gleaned from inane debate encompassing the issue of political dynasty. We tend to quibble at the horrendous triviality of having a father and son, sister and brother scenario at the Senate, while remaining apathetic to the fact that we have a commission with an awesome task to ensure decency and trustworthiness this coming elections, albeit renowned by the passive Filipino voter himself, and no less than the Supreme Court for its blatant thievery of automated dimensions, and brazen dishonesty of "Garcillanic" proportions.
Gravely similar to the revolting preoccupation of deceiving ourselves with the illusion that we live in a democracy. When the Godfather of Singapore Lee Kwan Yew castigated our country for its irrational exuberance of unproductive liberties, mercilessly castigating our so-called democracy, we should have answered back with the frequently ignored fact that our plundered land at no time, wretchedly on no occasion tasted the emancipating flavor of freedom.
From the perspective of history, during the financially impoverished times of President Carlos P. Garcia when grinding poverty settles hopelessness in the throne of ascendancy, and the malaise of mediocrity pervades every Filipino soul, the uncompromising nationalist President Carlos Garcia stirred the pride of the Filipinos beyond the heights of luminosity, only to be repudiated by the blue-seal engrossed citizenry when he courageously struggled against the imperial intrusion of Uncle Sam in our supposedly sovereign affairs.
Undoubtedly, cultural paradoxes can only be fought and vanquished through agonizing discernment, the kind wherein a society decides to gamble and risk, only this time no cards included, just plain old honesty to critically unsettle ourselves by surmounting our absurd biases and ludicrous prejudices to rectify our colonially brainwashed mind, disavowing the narrow-minded paradigm that victory both political and cultural solely belongs to the depraved.