Local Campaign

The 45 days local election campaign has begun and candidates are now busy wooing the electorate of their precious votes. Just this morning I saw the incumbent vice-mayor of Taytay, Rizal, now running for the mayoralty, busy shaking hands, smiling, exuding an aura of sincerity that could put the Dalai Lama and the Pope to shame while his insectus de alipores were busy putting posters and banners of people we never even knew existed on our street.

The unemployed, the gamblers and the good for nothing good people of our neighborhood were smiling and talking how these chitinous faced people would only appear during campaigns and once elected would be as difficult to find as an onion-skinned armadillo. But still they would go along with drama, yalking with the candidates, smiling and shaking hands and when these campaigners went past hearing distance, then the curse of Montezuma and Kulams would fell upon them. If cussing could kill people, these candidates would have died a million deaths—painful, slow deaths.

I’m sure these candidates are also cussing, with the same intensity and quantity, the people they’re wooing. So, I guess through the law of negation, the death inducing cusses spewed balances by the end of the day. Nobody dies. Sad, may I say. Err…I mean, good, may I say.

(If I am God (sorry) I would make cussing fatal; for every cuss spewed a person above the age of 25 dies. I was thinking of my neighbor. If ever me (as God) (sorry) put the one cuss one death policy in effect, my neighbor could depopulate the Philippines in matter of minutes. Whatever topic she’s discussing it will not be complete if not punctuated by cusses; she uses a lot of ellipsis (those three periods) too.

Hmmmm….I just realized this. The way she talk, her animated hands move, the way she captures her audiences’ attention, I just realized that she’ll make a good preacher.)

Anyways, these politicians are just acting out roles that that electorate expects them to play and in the end everybody is happy with the comedy.

We get the leadership we get. My advice to my country men this election: Between two evils, choose the lesser one. Between the immoral and the amoral, always choose the lesser one; between the comedian and the comic, always choose the lesser one; between the inane and the insane, always choose the lesser one; between two evils, always choose the lesser one.

We have few good men. Most of them are dead, some are in jails, and those who run in the election rarely made it past the filing for candidacy stage. Sad.