THE PRESIDENT’S satisfaction rating has again dived according to the latest SWS survey. But surveys make monkeys out of our people and leaders.
With the way things have been going in an occasionally demented society such as ours, where its opinionated citizens in general treat survey results seriously enough to create a stir that bears detrimental ripple effects on the future of our country, I see only three uses and purposes of surveys.
The first is to build bandwagon effects to favor certain candidates during election time and therefore subvert the people’s will to wisely choose and elect worthy candidates. The second is, after the elections, to “destroy” the president by public sycophancy if the survey result is positive or put him down in the people’s estimation if the result doesn’t thrust him out good.
The third is for business and political purposes. Between one election period and another, I perceive politics and “business” to be always behind every popularity survey being conducted and every result being announced by the so-called survey firms. I can always argue against the objectives and “behind the scene” schemes of these so-called surveys.
Surveys, “our way,” are not about democracy. They are about unbridled madness. Popularity surveys before, during and even after elections should be seen through a plain (not magnifying) glass or else they must be used strictly for private consumption. I see no other design for the results to be announced and amplified publicly but for “profiteering” and “politicking.”
A president is judged not by what the contemporary people perceives about his person and performance for the moment (as in the case of the much criticized Abraham Lincoln during his time as a leader of his people), but by what history and the future generations (not surveys) would hold for him on the basis of his heart, strength, wisdom and virtues to bravely and decisively cross every Jordan River along the way towards “daang matuwid.”
Because of survey “ratings,” the president may either end up being held hostage to the abstract whims of an abstract world of politics and vested interests, unable to stand up for anything worthwhile just to gain “pogi points” and be “liked” by the people “all the time”; or bear the yoke of true leadership to conquer the future and win the promise of a looming horizon for the entire beloved motherland.
—RENI M. VALENZUELA,
renimvalenzuela@yahoo.com