DEMOCRACY at its barest is all about the right to vote and being counted. That is why we wait for election after election. It is the only time when we feel we live in a democratic country no matter how the opposition in every presidential term says otherwise.
We take elections seriously no matter how they become open markets for buyers and sellers of votes in ingenious forms and we remain impassive as vote buying becomes a sophisticated art that downplays both guilt and liability to the law. We fix our mind on our preferred candidates and put winning above anything else. “Win first and do good governance after” is a moral consoling line we have become accustomed to.
Half-way through the term of incumbents, we start seeing signs of incompetence, bad leadership, graft and corruption. This feeds our early longing for the next election. Before, we grabbed our favorite broadsheets and tabloids from the early morning stalls to satisfy our quest for emerging challengers and wannabes. Now, we have our smart phones that make us feel smarter as we surf the internet trying to sieve posts to separate news from fake news as if the difference matters in relation to their effect to the online public at all.
In this era of social media we become our own experts giving the real experts stiff competition in their own trade. The press becomes depressed over the lopsided competition with the swarm of troll and non-troll posters and vloggers. The press as we know it is hard-pressed to get used to the technology that made journalism a tougher struggle for truth.
What sells are whacks and catcalls in bullet form. Lofty ideals and logic in complete sentences are deemed boring. So what we rummage through are collages of both true and false images of public personalities that pass for alternatives or worthy heirs. This is how we anticipate the coming election. This is how we wait for the next president. Waiting for the next president is now like scrolling the latest sales online.
In our kind of democracy we just wait for president after president to make things better. It is our faith on the constitution no matter how you think it has to be changed. But we were just reminded by Dr. Clarita Carlos, a professor of political science at the University of the Philippines, that we have been electing leaders without “geopolitical perspective or vision of who we are as a country.” Except for Marcos she added and that excited Marcos Loyalists anew who have been waiting for Marcos after Marcos. The forever anti-Marcos crowd is not smiling.
Waiting for president after president can be deceptively amusing … and ominous. My gut feeling says we just make the best of what we have and strive harder to use our democracy better.
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