THERE is an ABS-CBN special about a mountain woman who journeyed for days to get to a voting precinct. She had done the same to be registered as a voter there. Closer to home, I got a tweet showing the photo of an 82-year-old man who walked in the baking heat to cast his vote. There was another tweet about 400 Aetas who made the same trek as that woman. Warren de Guzman chose to report on the least interesting, yet the most important, electorate in the country: old people, who have already paid their dues to this country, unlike young people, who only pay to Globe and Smart.
Now, in order to test their resolve, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) arranged that old people already registered in their respective precincts must cast their votes in designated areas inaccessible because of distance and height, on the top floors of hot and crowded school buildings. Once they got to the top, they were made to wait for hours, de Guzman said. I guess, to check if they will drop dead, so they can be struck from the voters’ list; kind of like two birds with one stone.
As a senior citizen myself, let me say, without calling you what you are because I vowed not to use bad words anymore, “Do not do us any favors just to look good pretending to help old people—but doing it in a way that will kill them. And yet, it is for such people, for those who take each painful step along the highway to cast their vote in the elections that democracy was invented in the first place: for the grizzled old men of Athens who pulled the oars of the rowing ships that protected Athenian freedom. It is for them that democracy was invented—and it was not to give them freedom, because they had that already.
Indeed, they freely gave of their time and strength to row the battleships of freedom. Democracy was invented to give their freedom its most appropriate political expression in a democracy.
It was also old people who stood in the front ranks of the phalanx, because experience enabled them to take the first fresh blows of the enemy full in the chest until they fell—and the young took their places, hopefully, or ran. We have just concluded an election; for the most part, cleanly; for some part, dirtily.
This election was not about democracy nor is democracy about elections.
If that were true, we should give up democracy, because elections have given us only crap for governments. It is just that elections seem the best way of picking the people who will run a democracy with the least threat to freedom. It is the safest but, by no means, the smartest way to pick such people. Lee Kuan Yew showed that democracy does not need the kind of elections we have.
My good friend Joey Leviste published a book of short pieces, written by people such as myself, and called it: If the Philippines had a Lee Kuan Yew. Yes, what would the Philippines be like if it had a Lee Kuan Yew? It would be what Singapore is: a perennially satisfied democracy, which is, to say, a government of, by and for the people.
It only seems like a dictatorship, because the people do not want change when they have it so good already.
In our country, elections are definitely not about democracy, because elections have not produced, even remotely, a government of, by and for the people. It has produced only government for the government and its chums.
This election has not yet settled anything. The elected president has yet to show that he is making a serious start at establishing a democracy—and that is to say a government of, by, and for the people—and not for himself and his chums.
So going back, democracy was invented for the sort of people who, against all reason, still believe; it is worth giving your last ounce of strength to cast your vote even if you barely survive to see it counted because the Commission on Elections has tried to kill you with the distance and the altitude. Fu—, fyu—; no I must keep my promise never again to use a bad word.