Standards high and low

John, my friend of nine years, stands across from me in a hospital lobby, dejected. His backpack is slung across his shoulder, and he’s going home like a rejected lover. He has been told that, after two months of the trial period we call preresidency, he hasn’t been accepted into a training program for internal medicine.

It’s the end of a familiar annual ritual. The ritual itself begins after the release of the Physician Licensure Exam results in August, when a lot of young doctors troop to various hospitals to begin one of the most trying periods of their careers: preresidency. During this period, which varies in length from weeks to months, preresidents battle for a slot in their desired residency training programs and hospitals. It’s a game of “Survivor” without the island; it’s the “Hunger Games” where the game masters are consultants and seniors who rate preresidents according to their academic credentials, efficiency, clinical skills and trainability.

At this point it can go both ways. For those who are accepted into their programs, the end of preresidency is a happy, celebrated event. It means that they can finally start training in their desired specialty, and begin to climb the ranks toward expertise, seniority and financial viability. But for those of us like John, it’s a crushing disappointment. Deadlines permitting, they can decide to try for another program in another hospital, or take the year off and wait for the programs to open preresidency applications again next year. Some—especially if they’ve been disappointed one too many times—may choose not to go into residency at all.

John stands at one of those crossroads. He is 27 years old and he has spent most of his life studying: four years at a science high school, four in college, four in one of the Philippines’ best medical schools, one in internship. Not for him the prestige and financial perks that people associate with being a doctor: Those are virtually nonexistent when you’re a fresh graduate. Years of late nights, missed holidays, and absences at family dinners later, John is jobless. This is all despite his kindness, intelligence and diligence; this is all despite the fact that he is qualified for the job.

He may well be a natural product of changing times. With the increasing numbers of new doctors being produced by Philippine medical schools, the competition for slots in training grows harder every year. Preresidents are forced to step up their game in order to be counted among the most worthy. Still, looking at John—given all of his qualifications—I can’t help but draw certain comparisons between the trajectory of his career and that of the politicians vying for our attention on all forms of media.

Weeks after Karen Davila’s Nov. 11 TV interview with senatorial aspirant Alma Moreno, social media has moved on: Our disgust over the flippancy and ignorance displayed by Moreno has now been transmuted into funny memes. Other topics, such as Mayor Rodrigo Duterte’s presidential candidacy, have taken its place in the public consciousness. Meanwhile, it’s possible that Moreno and many others like her will continue to climb ranks in politics despite being “poorly qualified.”

It forces us to question what it means to be qualified in the first place. Degrees in policymaking and administration are clearly not a prerequisite for public office. Then, apart from the minimum requirements of natural citizenship and literacy, what do Filipinos need or want from their elected leaders? The answers are fairly obvious: Integrity, experience and good intentions would be a good start, and degrees from universities here and abroad would be nice if these can be had, just to comfort us into thinking that we’re in intelligent, capable hands. A baseline requirement, too, is that they should have some sort of advocacy or a platform; that they should have picked a specific windmill at which to tilt, so that even if they can’t solve the systemic problems of the Philippines, then at least they can take steps toward solving smaller ones.

What makes the Alma Moreno issue so poignant is that she and many others like her seem not to possess any of these qualities, and yet they are being voted into public office anyway. Rather than an isolated incident, the interview is more probably the tip of the iceberg: It sheds light on the idea that the Filipino arena is crawling with candidates with little to their credit apart from social connections.

It is a huge disappointment to my generation to truly realize that while we spend most of our 20s and 30s chasing after educational degrees and work experience to earn a comfortable living, many politicians earn many times our salary while doing a fraction of the work to get there. If John, who has spent most of his life studying, hasn’t even been allowed to treat patients as an internist simply because he didn’t make the cut, then why should ignorant politicians who haven’t even done enough Google-fu to answer questions about the Reproductive Health Law be allowed to “treat” the Philippines? Why have we set the standards for other professionals so high, and the standards for politicians so low?

As voters, we have to stop defending candidates just because they can say with a straight face that they have “a heart for the Filipino people.” The Constitution, crafted with a mind toward fairness and democracy, is not about to change in order to provide more stringent standards for candidacy. Rather, it is our duty to expect more from our politicians, and it is the politicians who should be bending over backward to meet those expectations. Just like the road to medicine or any other field of expertise, the road to candidacy should be paved with so much more than good intentions—and sometimes our candidates don’t have even that.

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