A burned ballot box . A fully-armed policeman donning a campaign propaganda while inside a voting center. Gun-brandishing private armies roaming the streets. Threats of death and physical harm. Black propaganda. Billions of of money poured into the campaign.
Only in the Philippines? Guess again.
The age of guns, goons and gold has landed in the United States of America, land of the free and home of the brave. We’re in distinguished company.
This is the most hate-filled presidential election campaign in US history, the Americans agree. And they haven’t even seen the worst yet, the ones that we have gotten accustomed to: campaign related killings, even massacre (read Maguindanao), vote-buying and massive election fraud and cheating.
I can hardly wait to see what we have in store for the world when we hold our own presidential elections in 2022. We are overly competitive when it comes to showing our bad side. What the Americans are doing, we can, and will, do worse. That’s a certainty. Well, almost.
I do not believe that we are capable of the restraint that most of America have remarkably displayed in the midst of a chaotic campaign. We will probably be killing each other especially since we have become inured to or numbed by the salvage/armed encounter-related deaths that have become a fixture in the war against drugs.
Sometimes I think it is a bad idea to hold elections periodically. Maybe, we should have them very far from each other so that we will miss them and learn to value them enough to protect their sanctity.
That will not happen, of course, unless another dictator will emerge and cling to power for more than 20 years or for as long as he is living.The problem with this scenario, however, is that if the people get tired of him and move to oust him, it will probably trigger more bloodshed than the one we have avoided in postponing our elections.
For indeed, the possibility is strong that the new dictator will not be as compliant as the first one who packed his clothes and fled in a helicopter with his family and cronies after being told to cut and cut clean. There is no assurance that like the original one he will not unleash his soldiers and tanks with clear instructions to fire at the people massing in Edsa to demand his removal. We have long lost that innocence.
President Duterte is the unlikeliest bet for a dictatorship. An autocrat has to covet the position and it is something that Duterte does not. On the contrary, he has repeatedly declared that he is already tired. And while his critics had ridiculed him every time he said it, he is probably not joking about considering resignation, only that he is unwilling to go down in history as the first president since Erap Estrada to quit the presidency.
So we will have an election in 2022. Some candidates and their partisans will get killed, that’s for sure. The people will sell their votes, armed goons will terrorize the voters and charges of massive electoral fraud will reverberate after the elections.
At least, we’re used to them already, unlike the Americans.