by Wilhelmina Orozco
The election of the next Philippine president in 2010 should be interesting. The results will yield how the Filipino people have viewed the past decade that brought us a lot of grave situations -- from corruption cases, the epidemic of H1N1, environmental disasters in Leyte, sinking of the ship, oil spill near Guimaras Island, and many more. It seems that Mother Nature herself had not been too good to this administration.
Yet how far will the Filipino people cling to the idea that change is in their or our hands and no other, that we and we alone can bring about a new Philippines, freed of all the shenanigans, manipulations and all other greedy tactics and strategies to impoverish the masses, and hold captive everyone to their machinations?
So many barriers are presented to prevent the people from being most assertive. Foremost of these is that traditional politics is the only reality in our country. Now the Peoples' Primaries can change all of that. The PP shall be the vehicle for making the people believe in their capability to overcome all obstacles to going to the democratic way of life.
After all, we are really fighting for true democracy in the Philippines, one where the majority of the people hold the torch for our victory in the polls. Yes, we, who believe in PP, must now reckon that we need to touch base with the people. They are the ones who hold the key to the success of the Peoples' Primaries and no other.
We need to make the people understand what is the democratic way of life. It is not simply being allowed to speak, write, or demonstrate in the streets. It means being able to follow certain procedures that do not step on the rights of other people. For example, in the district levels, where we expect the people to be nominating and voting for the candidates that they believe in in the Primaries, the nature of social relationships is still feudal.
Feudal means that they believe in hierarchical decision-making, that the lower they go in the social ladder, the less human rights they have. In meetings this is very obvious -- where the leaders talk as if they were the owners of the community organization and the community funds.
Just see how the cities here are overflowing with tarpaulins with the most trivial messages of local officials. One even had the brazenness to put up a kind of arc with his name (VB) on it right there on an island in the middle of a main street. Just because he happens to be related to the mayor, the people had just taken this show of political arrogance meekly.
The tarpaulins do not really want to communicate anything meaningful to the people. They just project the faces of the officials and are intended to make them remember them come 2010. This type of campaigning has been going on since time immemorial and has grown worst this past three years, for obvious reasons: the Malacanang unwanted guest does the same.
Hence, among other things, we need to instill in the people democratic ways of dealing with each other. We need to tell the candidates who will be in the Primaries that eventually, their own ethical stance has to be overhauled, that is if they have hewed closely to the feudal type of relations where they value dominance instead of communitarian values.
We also need to educate the people on certain rules at meetings wherein everyone shall have the chance to give their own views of issues and agenda that are being discussed. In this way, there would be free flow of ideas, and everyone can experience being politically valued, respected and regarded. Hence, the leader and the people must not only scout for the best candidate for any position but must seek that candidate that will continue this democratic way of life once elected.
Hopefully, after the elections, we shall have gotten a new profile of winning candidates, one that will truly make every voter proud of having voted, since in the first place, he or she would have been responsible for having nominated and vote for them.
2010 PEOPLES' PRIMARIES shall then be forever imprinted as that deciding period in Philippine political history, where the hands of the people in shaping our future shall have been clearly etched.
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