Saturday, November 08, 2008 Carvajal: Disappointing reactions By Orlando P. Carvajal Break Point
COMPARISONS are odious.
Still, some reactions to the historic US presidential elections are disappointing. Two that I read about the next day provide telling evidence of how shallow our politicians, and how skewed their priorities, can be.
Local government officials in Cebu were reportedly impressed by the speed of the US elections that used extensively modern voting and counting technologies. They were envious and wished we had the wherewithal to use the same technology and speed up both the voting and the counting.
This is like admiring the accessories of a car instead of the advanced engineering of the engine and body that are the essential elements of a truly good car. In the US, in fact, there is a growing dissatisfaction with non-uniform voting systems and counting technologies. But their democracy is strong not because of technology although it helps but essentially because people have a choice of issues and candidates.
This is what we should be envious of, the engine of American politics which is the two- party system. The two parties present the people with clearly distinct politico-economic alternatives and the people vote on them. If we had more of this kind of politics, we would be better off even if we had less advanced voting and counting technologies. This is what we should be primarily envious of.
But the reaction on technology is not half as bad as that of United Opposition (UNO) spokesperson Adel Tamano, who said that the election of Barack Obama inspires UNO and gives it hope that it can win in the elections of 2010.
If the Democrats could wrest power from a very unpopular George Bush, he reasons, then UNO can hope to wrest power from a very unpopular Gloria Arroyo.
Tamano’s parallelism is nauseating. He conveniently forgets that the American people have chosen Barack Obama to be the one to dig them out of the big hole George Bush has gotten them into. He further glosses over the fact that UNO, unlike the principled Democrats, stands for nothing bigger than itself and has nobody that could possibly be a better alternative to Gloria Arroyo.
UNO does not mean deliverance from the evils of the Arroyo administration.
In fact, it has people who could, from their record, be expected to do worse.
Besides, it is not rare for the opposition to make up for lost time by looting the country in a worse way than the previous administration.
What we should envy the US for is they’ve never been short of patriots running for office and who stand for something. In spite of that, they are still trying to perfect their union. This should inspire us to continually work to achieve unity in this country. To paraphrase Obama, it might take us longer but yes we can and will get there.
