Tuesday, March 27, 2007 Oledan: Differing views By Radzini Oledan
IT MIGHT not be an overgeneralization to say that many in the middle and upper classes find elections to be a source of both frustration and anxiety. Election after election, politicians who they perceive to be inept or corrupt are returned to power.
Actors, entertainers, and sports heroes with little or no experience in politics routinely do well in the polls. Yes, despite this disappointingly lackadaisical performance in office. One even became president with nothing but legislative measure to his name - a law on carabaos. Consequently, many in the middle and upper classes are left with a feeling of electoral powerlessness.
Many politicians work hard to cultivate the poor vote. They sponsor community projects such as school building, street lighting, well digging, and drainage cleaning. They also provide more direct payoffs to voters by supplying potential supporters with food, money, free medical care, scholarships, discounted funerals, and the like.
Some are troubled by this kind of patronage politics while others feel contempt for incompetent politicians and to those who keep reelecting them.
But not all wealthy Filipinos possess such feelings, of course. Crony capitalists who bankroll politicians surely hold different opinions.
Still, misgivings about the poor can be heard in sitting rooms, coffee houses, and office buildings across the country, and read in almost all of the major newspapers.
"Nagpapabayad kasi." "Dalawang kilo nang bigas para sa tatlong taong paghihirap." These are some of the comments we often hear.
Values intervention is unlikely to come anytime soon.
Changes, on the other hand, face serious political and constitutional challenges and thus, reformers -for practical, political, or ethical reasons -have banked on a different way to put the poor in their place: corrective intervention.
That is, they have tried to discipline the poor, to train them to vote correctly.
The poor are often criticized for not voting wisely, which is just another way of saying that they are not voting the way some of us want them to.
Voter education, however, requires knowledge about those to be educated. To effectively teach people how to vote "wisely" requires understanding the reasons why they vote "unwisely."
The different advocacies pushed forward as part of voter's education need to look into the basics. Remember Edsa 3 when a new awareness emerged among reformers that they do not really understand whom they wanted to educate?
