Revelry
bcupin@theguidon.com

Sometimes I wish I had or that we all had the luxury of not having to care about the 2010 elections.

My very first look into the world of Philippine politics was two elections ago when my father decided he would help a long-time friend’s congressional campaign. Tito [insert name here] was an occasional sight in our house. He’d have coffee with my father on our porch after dinner. He had the “perfect” background; he was well-educated, did well in his last job and had a good family to boot. In my eyes, he was everything the incumbent local officials were not. Plus points because he happened to be the opposition’s standard bearer.

Then one day I noticed different letters scattered around out dining table; they were addressed to prominent businessmen in our city. A few days before the elections, I noticed a bag full of money (P20 and P100 bills, no less) nonchalantly placed on the same table. Suffice to say, my mind was blown. I learned the hard way that sometimes, even the “good guys” have to doing bad things.

The idea of people “having to do it” bothered me the most. It was as if it was necessary to do dubious, and dare I say, immoral things. The more I thought about it, the more it didn’t make sense but I tried to justify it anyway. They were doing this to overthrow the incumbents, I assured myself. I was sure that they would do a much much better job if they got elected into office.

But it didn’t change how awful I felt to know that everyone (at least in my locality at that time) resorted to vote-buying and goodness-knows-what in order to ensure a win.

As early as now, so much (often damaging) news about the presidentiables are breaking from all over the Internet. We have Rico Blanco’s twitter rant when Gibo used his song without his permission (turns out Viva owns the rights to the song, so legally all’s well), a column about Villar being Arroyo’s “secret presidential bet” (we don’t know how this is going to end yet) and for Noynoy there’s always the question of his experience and capacity to be president.

All of them sound very probable. It also doesn’t hurt that they’re juicy and scandalous; you just know media and the public will eat that all up.

Making the decision of who to vote in the elections is difficult enough; it’s made even harder with all these (possible) hate propaganda. I don’t mean to say that these news reports are unfounded and untrue. After all, the old adage reminds us that ‘when there’s smoke, there’s fire.’

Sometimes when I open Facebook or Twitter, I find myself flooded with so many conflicting reports about the different candidates. It becomes too easy to be swayed into voting for one candidate or the other because of these reports, tweets or posts.

It’s a cliché that should be rightfully put to rest but the youth vote is critical in the coming elections. For many first time-voters, this makes the responsibility even more difficult. I won’t lie; even I find it tiring to read one article after another about the elections. And we even haven’t started discussing who to vote for senator.

It can be tiring and it is definitely daunting.

But I will vote no matter what. It was a hot and humid day when I registered and I’m not about to put that effort into waste by not voting (mababaw, yes I am). More importantly, I know how important the 2010 elections (and any national election for that matter) is, and I do not plan on being passive during such a crucial point in our country’s history.