These are my main concerns that stand in the way on every election:
Firstly, how the voters won’t be swayed by candidates bluffing of a healthier, safer, better living for Filipinos.
Secondly, how to muster the misled voters—the youth above all—to think wisely, care enough, and do good for our country in so doing.
In nearly every case, the youth today fail to see the truth beneath the follies and falsities around. They often reduce unearthing the bare bones of corruption and deception as mere feeding the public a diet of political gossip.
They’re insensitive that bad politicians are in droves, as there are gullible voters. They’re not wary of the facts and ideas needed in order to know the truth. Oftentimes, they decide wrongly and get bogged down endlessly into murky issues.
Right now, a number of young, misinformed voters adopt the position that Ferdinand Marcos Sr. had filled the country with happiness, peace, and prosperity during his rule. But when they take the opposite view that happiness, peace, and riches were only true for Marcos family, cronies, and toadies, they learn the real score of military and human rights abuses, injustices, murder, insurgency, economic slump, plunder, and corruption under the Marcos martial law regime that bred poverty on the whole.
While we, elders, don’t entirely expect the youth to rid of daydreams, we must take them by the hand, open their minds on the politicians’ sleight of hand in stealing and cheating, and apprise them of responsibility and decision. When they make and take charge of their decisions, they never leave their life and fate to chance.
To know the truth from the quality of information and facts at hand gives the youth the value to decide in good faith. As they decide to take the right step, stand, and walk for the good alongside the fervor for uprightness, truth, and justice for the youth of tomorrow, they can understand and play fair that we all shall not have to save doing what is right for later.
We must stand up against the handiwork of today’s electoral sham: altering the votes, tolerating the cheater and liar elected officials to rule the roost for six years of diabolic, dynastic, autocratic, egoistic control.
We should, as much as we can, resist to elect:
One who attempts like a strongman but whose policies turn the country weaker;
Anyone who makes political capital but mutilates the nation’s moral, social, economic fabric;
Anybody who promises to keep better order but plays a big role in the national slaughter;
Someone who corrupts, hocks to the largest extent, yet sinks the dying economy much further;
Somebody who flatters himself, ignoring and revising history, lying that he’s here to redeem the country’s greatness, but is in fact manipulating voters in order to regain his family’s hidden stolen billions abroad.
Our passive behavior can’t get us anywhere. If we never end our biases toward the crimes and grimes of crooks and liars, we abet corruption than out-stamp it, and lose sight of getting to the bottom of poverty, which is at the core of people’s miseries.
If we remain quiet and submissive, we allow them to infringe on our rights. To justify their evildoings is to rob ourselves of the power to take them to task, and to sap our might to rise up from the filth and squalor they’ve thrown us in.
There has to be a serious rethinking and reacting for us electorates in the upcoming elections. Guard our most precious possession—our votes—and heed the inner voice that hardly ever shuts up: Never again for another Marcos or Duterte to overrule, cheat, fool, and rob us blind once more!
Let’s make the right judgment. If we lose this opportunity now, this country will further sink. Conscience is the only limit to scout for a selfless leader to do the right thing in the right way: LENI ROBREDO—no other else! Let’s go for Leni, good fellows!
Pit M. Maliksi, pitmaliksi2004@yahoo.com