loria Arroyo again got it
wrong when she said she would not allow election instability to mar her last
years in office. Elections do not cause instability. On the contrary, elections
– the honest and credible kind, that is – promote stability.
Granted that elections generate so much passion, that itself
is also the beauty of having a regular procedure by which to choose leaders.
Elections are the safety valve that vent off the tension that accumulates in a
society where members have differing and, at times, conflicting conceptions of
what is good and just and how to attain them.
Gloria is again selling a fraudulent bill of goods in raising
the bogey of instability. For what is the alternative to elections? Hereditary
succession no longer fits modern times. There’s a good reason the French
revolutionaries overthrew the monarchy two hundreds years ago. If we have
forgotten the lesson, then just imagine Mikey and Dato as heirs presumptive to
realize how lucky we are that we live in a democracy.
What else can we possibly adopt in lieu of genuine choices
freely made inside the sanctity of the polling place? We are not saying our
system is perfect. It isn’t, but not because there is something wrong in the
principle of having elections. What ails the system are the rampant violations
of election laws. And talking of election law breakers, Gloria is the least
qualified to lecture us on how to ensure the credibility of the process.
We believe our politics, however rambunctious and at times
violent, is immeasurably better than not having the right to throw out the
bastards when elections come. That’s our basic difference with Gloria. Any
leader, however honest and competent, can make mistakes. He is, after all, only
human. Elections are the institutionalized mechanism by which society can
correct mistaken goals, policies and programs.
Now, let us take the case of Gloria. It is possible that
Gloria, by anchoring her programs on a purportedly strong economy, is leading us
to ruination instead of her promised progress. Poverty and hunger, for example,
are on the rise.
That’s the argument for giving elections more weight in our
scale of political values. In this discussion we have even given Gloria the
benefit of the doubt by drawing a Lee Kuan Yew type of leader to give her
position some semblance of respectability.
The fact is she stole the elections. She and her pack are
plundering the Treasury. They are exacting kickbacks from big ticket projects.
They are demonizing elections, especially the ones scheduled in 2010, not
because they have grand visions like Lee Kuan Yew.
The long and short of it is that they are thieves who dread the prospects,
first, of an end to their thieving ways, and, second, of ending up in jail when
a new – and, hopefully, legitimately elected – administration takes over a scant
three years from now.
