PUBLIC SERVICE ads urge us: Vote for a president who has a vision for the future, an effective leadership style, a political philosophy.
Don’t complicate matters.
Vote for a president who is not a thief, whose relatives are not thieves, who does not surround himself with thieves.
Our needs are simple, our expectations low.
We don’t require a vice president to be descended from heroes. But we would like someone whose father is not in the Guinness Book of Records as one of the biggest thieves of all time and whose mother’s stolen jewels are not on display at the national museum.
We are not asking for senators who are willing to die for their country. But we wish not too many of them would have secret bank accounts, offshore investments and New York real estate properties. We can tolerate a certain level of hypocrisy among politicians, but we cannot accept a senator on bail for plunder delivering speeches against immorality in society.
We don’t expect our local officials, governors and mayors to be paragons of public service. But we do want our provincial hospitals to be staffed with doctors who show up and do not ask us to pay for aspirin. We don’t need public schools with Internet facilities. We just want school rooms with desks and chairs.
We don’t imagine the likes of Padre Pio to be part of our Congress. But we would like a legislative body where fewer than one-fourth of its members have been indicted or about to be indicted for graft.
Let’s keep things simple. Forget the party platforms, the platitudes from the Church and well-meaning advice from NGOs. They don’t apply to the present situation. We simply don’t have candidates who are competent, honest, sincere, decent, devoted to their community and country. Our options are limited. In the absence of such candidates, the best we can do is choose the bad over the worse. No thieves, please. Or at the very least, not the shameless, scandalous, superplunderers.
—MARTIN D. BAUTISTA, MD, mdbautista62@gmail.com