RATIONALITY, EQUALITY AND TIMING OF ELECTIONS

As I plod through the days trying to make my name be known in 142 barangays of Quezon City, I encounter lessons which need answers, solutions, and problems which need being addressed right away but might take a generation to do. 

First of all, the rationality of public political advertising is problematic for me. How can a poster containing the name and the picture of the candidate become a good measure of what he or she will do once in office? But that is what is being shown now in 95% of the posters and tarps that I have seen. The guts of the candidates is admirable. They can smile through and think probably that the people will just buy what they have printed there, hook, line and sinker. 

I think that is a very low thought which needs to be corrected. The proliferation of posters does not mean that we have a vibrant political exercise. It just means that the need to protect the environment is not seriously being considered at all. Those materials after elections will just become covers for the seats of tricycles and jeepneys, thus lowering the dignity of our public drivers. Why should they be satisfied with having such as the seats for their vehicles? Don't they deserve a first hand material with design that they themselves or the operators have made?

Moreover, our youth are being introduced to a political exercise that is wasteful and irrational. It is wasteful because millions of pesos are being spent for the picture of one candidate only because their propagandists think that name recall will fall from that method. But they are wrong. 

The people could turn aghast at such proliferation especially when they are reeling from the high costs of living and the expenses for the materials are just plain wasteful. 

Where is the rationality in that?

Secondly, Equality. Time and again I have mentioned Comelec so that at least they would be creative and imaginative enough to solve the problem of inequality of resources of candidates --those poor candidates whose only offering is a sincere and honest heart to serve are always at a disadvantage vis-a -vis those candidates who are still holding on to their power and who have access to public funds. 

What is the solution here? Make those incumbents resign from their posts and the budgets released to them be audited for their adherence to legal practices of expending them. Is that not a normal thing to be done by any government employee?

Those incumbents should not even be allowed to use vehicles of their offices anymore. They should be treated as equals of all the candidates for the same posts that they want to get elected to. Hence, their acts of brazenly using funds and resources of the posts they are attached to become a "normal" course of event which should be corrected pronto already. 

Did you know that one candidate used her father to intervene and stop the help being given by a patron to a candidate simply because that latter is her opponent? or was she imagining an opponent who is actually so poor that she cannot even hire a cab to go from one barangay to another but take only the public transport in order to distribute flyers and tarpaulins?

Comelec definitely plays a big part in making our political exercise sane or rational and an equal exercise of the right to vote and be voted upon at least. 

Lastly, due to climate change, summer is extremely hot already in our country, reaching as high as 38 degrees, which is one degree higher than the normal body temperature. For everyone to be able to campaign despite that heat is to extract a superhuman effort to overcome the environmental degradation. 

Hence, I suggest that we move the election period next time to October or November since the temperature would be much cooler by then. I think more older people would have the appetite to run and serve sincerely if the climate that we would be working in is much cooler. I have to leave the house late afternoons, actually in order to avoid the possibility of suffering from heatstroke outside.  

Rationality, equality and timing are very important factors in determining if we really have a healthy political exercise. Otherwise we seem to be just putting up a charade, a facade all to give the incumbents running for office a chance to look legal in all their actions and making them win without these factors being brought out into the open. We are just being used as tools to make our political exercise look very "legitimate."

Hello world, look at us; here we are, we are making history.