A tip for the coming 2010 elections: don't be an idiot.
POSTED AT 12:48 AM

Blacksword

So.. let's be honest. with all the corruption and idiocy going on in the Philippine government today, would you still want to vote?

Well, if you really are going to waste your time doing so, let me give you my take on what I think would happen in the coming election. 

First of all, it won't really matter if you'd vote or not. Your vote will not count. It's either someone's gonna use your identity and vote for you, or you'll vote, but it won't count. As the last election taught us, half of the country's population is in maguindanao, and they're all pro-administration, haha (just kidding, btw). They're only campaigning so that whatever votes they can conjure up would look legit. What I mean is, no matter how educated the public is, cheating WILL happen, whether you like it or not. And no big fish will ever be caught cheating. they have been so adept at cheating that they have developed intricate webs of deceit, with no accountability whatsoever for the inner circles of this web. Not even Marcos was convicted of cheating in a court trial, not even when he was so blatantly manipulating the numbers at the 1986 snap elections (but the public was pretty fed up by that time, so this led to that, and, well, you know what happenned afterwards). So if you're going to vote, then it would be best if you just sold your vote. That way, you don't have to totally waste your time at the voting centers, since you did earn some money. trust me, it still happens in a lot of places, especially in the provinces, where the reach of Imperial Manila and its educated voters are short.

Second, the automated voting process. Seems like it won't push through. But if it did, no matter how fool-proof they may seem to be, when there is a corrupt will, there is a way. There would still be technical staff attending to the machines, who could possibly be bribed. The data could still be corrupted or replaced, one way or another. If they're not transferring the data through a network, there's the possibility of transports carrying the storage devices being hijacked, just like when they hijacked ballots back then. And, from what I've heard, even if the voting machines aren't connected to a network, the final tally would still be sent to the united states for verification through the internet. Which will definitely be vulnerable should anyone try to 'hack' the systems doing the transfer. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for an automated system. But I don't think it would work, with our current situation and all. 

Third, the candidates. 

Good Lord, I could go on forever. 

I mean, would you vote for someone who was accused of plunder together with his dad, and whose only role in the senate was to make ROTC mandatory, and taunt Bolante with the question 'ano ang mas importante sa yo, bayan o meeting mo?' during the fertilizer scam investigations?

Or someone who never did anything meaningful in the senate, wasted the senate's and the people's attention by talking about celebrity scandals, and yet has enough free time and nerve to host a badly-conceptualized rip-off of a show on television and make badly hastened movies just to make papogi? What. The. Fuck. 

We've had enough of those useless idiots. I don't know how they managed to win (I guess a lot of people were equally dumb as well), but at least they're just useless idiots who have no idea what they're doing.

But what about those who do know what they're doing and are actively hurting the nation and it's people?

I don't know the ones whom you should vote for, but I do know the ones whom you shouldn't.

You should never vote for the ones who uses the poor as a platform for their campaign.

Why?

Well, I don't know about you, but in my opinion, they're the ones who are hurting the poor.

Ever since the Philippines became a country, there have been poor people in it. And ever since the nation became a democracy, there have been politicians who have taken advantage of the uneducated masses. 

Why the poor people? Well, it doesn't take a genius to know that they consist the largest percentage of the entire population. Plus, they're really easy to trick. The upper classes, oh, you'd have a lot to do to please those just to include their help into your political machinery. And besides, there aren't a lot of rich people compared to the rest of the population, anyway. For the middle class wage-earners (who, by the way, are the true heroes of the nation and are the ones who should really be taken care of), if you're going to run for office, then you'll really have to be honest if you want to please them. But the poor, oh the poor. Give them food, money, shirts with your face on them, what have you. And boom, instant multitude of votes. 

And then the hurting starts once they win. 

I think they're hurting the poor specifically for the reason of having more easily-pleased voters every election season. The more poor people to 'help', the more votes they can gather. A lot of people are pushed to crime every election time. I don't want to be so pointy-fingered, but if you've lived in this country, you certainly don't wonder anymore why kidnappings and bank robberies occur whenever election season is near. And these evil men continue to destroy the country by manipulating the votes of the masses in favor of candidates who don't even have an idea what they're actually supposed to do with their position. And once they win, they instantly forget about the poor people who developed diabetes because of their sugar-coated sweet promises. They forget about the people to whom they promised to give everything, if they just wrote the candidate's name on their ballots.

What really happens once they win is that those wage-earners and small-to-medium-businesses who actually pay their taxes would be paying the politicians PhP19 billion in pork barrel, or have their taxes spun around in a very corrupt and inept system (which will then be mostly used up on travel money whenever Manny Pacquiao has a fight in Las Vegas, or on gas for their big black SUVs, among other things). While the poor continues to be poor, because the people they voted for have forgotten about them and are busy either paying back the big businesses that helped them during the election. Or doing trivial stuff, like making movies, hosting tv shows, digging up dirt about each other in the form of 'exposes', and then throwing it around so they'd have less competitors the next election. Or investigating celebrity scandals which would be better left to Lolit Solis and Butch Francisco. Or distracting our boxing heroes by enticing them to run for congress. 

Whatever happens, once they win, we lose. 

Now, it's not like I don't want everyone to vote. But with this kind of political atmosphere, would you stilll want to vote? 

Right now, there are a lot of organizations that are conducting campaigns to push for an honest, clean election. But let's be realistic. What can we really do against the established machinery of the corrupt politicians? Who are we going to go against? There's no definite organization or individual that we really can put a finger on. You catch a group of goons stealing ballots, and all you'll ever accomplish is jail the grunts of an organization that's so intricate, it's most likely that you won't get any undeniable evidence pointing to a mastermind. Everything's deniable. No 'big fish' has ever been convicted in a trial on cheating, or even held in one, for that matter. No one can be accused of anything, except the grunts who just wanted to make some easy money by doing the dirty jobs. It's like trying to fight smoke with your bare fists. 

Besides, there's no use fighting it. It's not as if you had a choice anyway, with the selection of candidates that we have right now.

So.. the only advice that I really can give the voters this coming election is to pray. Start getting close to God, because he's the only one who can save our country now. 

By the way, if I have touched some nerves with what I've written, I apologize. I'm particularly cynical when it comes to politics, which I rarely talk about. I'm not a political anaylist as well. Just a regular citizen of a nation besieged by power-driven politics.

So, before some black ops knock on my door and shoot me in the head..

Ciao!

Feeling: the urge to pee