WE COMMON people have so much to worry about in our everyday lives that we have little time to learn about the law and how our government works.
One thing that has bugged me ever since I noticed as a child is the fact that every election season, we see a flurry of government construction projects happen right out of the blue, especially when it comes to roads, highways, bridges, and such.
As much as I’d like to ignore these for the sake of my health and because I have bigger fish to fry, I simply cannot. Not being a resident of any of the downtown district, I must travel some ways to get to places in the city that matter, and I’m sure all of you would agree when I say that traffic jams are one of those things that simply cannot be ignored.
While road pileups are an everyday occurrence, they get much, much worse during election season. My theory is that this is because so many road projects happen all at once and at major roads no less (and there’s no need for me to name names, you already know who’s responsible because the politicians involved would always hang tarps emblazoned with their names and faces anyway).
Making things worse is the fact that such road projects are unnecessary where they are situated right now – by this I mean that the roads that you see currently being wrecked to make way for a new slab of pavement, are not even badly in need of repair.
I took one such road just recently and noticed that holes were being bored into what used to be a perfectly good lane – a sign that it was a done deal that they were going to break it up so that they can pour fresh concrete later on. The lane just next to it was the one that was bumpy and worn, but the construction workers chose to wreck the good one one instead! While I’m sure that if asked about that fact they’d just shrug their shoulders and say “Don’t look at me, I’m only doing my job,” I wonder if they know deep in their hearts that the thing they were doing at the moment is, to say the least, simply absurd.
Don’t get me wrong, government construction projects aren’t all bad. But the thing about putting some of them in the hands of elected officials is that they tend to use them as an electioneering strategy – and fortunately for them, it is the taxpayer who pays for it and not them.
Talk about being made to pay for the rope being used to strangle you! Furthermore, if you’ve been to the same places in the city I’ve been to, you’ll see that certain roads and even unfinished building projects have been left neglected and abandoned for a long time. There are several reasons why this is so: 1) They don’t matter to the politician. 2) The politician won, so there’s no need to follow through. 3) The politician lost, so he won’t follow through, it’s not his business anymore anyway. 4) The politician won, but he didn’t do so well in that particular barangay, so he won’t follow through out of spite.
Meanwhile, you’ll notice that the closer you get to said politician’s house, you’ll find that the roads are much better. If anything, people should regard such projects with politicians’ names and faces as the kiss of death – that is, they are people who ought not be trusted to hold office anymore.
One of my New Year’s resolutions is to accentuate the positive in everything I see, no exceptions. That means giving everyone, or at least as many people as I can, the benefit of the doubt. But with politicians pulling stunts like these whenever election seasons rolls around – not just “fixing” roads that aren’t even broken to begin with, but very visibly going on medical missions, very visibly helping out disaster and conflict-stricken areas, and very visibly getting married (it’s for the romance really, they swear!) and even having children (it’s because they care for children just like the rest of us, they swear!) – I think that when I said to myself I’ll be giving even politicians the benefit of the doubt, I bit off more than I could possibly chew.