The editorial, carried by all Sun*Star publications on Election Day of 1998, went this way:

“The democratic direction is towards increasing National Synergy, not towards further division. However, overzealous partisanship has served to divide, to divide further, and to divide permanently. No one wins this way; the entire Filipino Nation loses.
“If it were clearly a contest between the preservation of dictatorial rule and the chance for democratic change, a high degree of partisanship would be quite understandable, in fact even legitimate, like during the Snap Elections of February 1986. But in a contest where there are many candidates who are basically of the same mold, and differ in the view of the various voters only in personality or in personal connections, rabid hostility is out of place among mature voters. “

The Filipino is worth dying for, all right, but is your politician really worth quarreling about? Why break families, why even break friendships and peace in the neighborhood over contending politicians? These may likely become political-convenience allies just months or even weeks after publicly slashing at each other’s throats! They may even all flock together in the new political coalition to be put by whoever will win! So, these politicians would have shaken hands, all-smiles, before cameras while their fans (short for fanatics) would still be quarreling, over them.

“Let’s discuss, even debate, and convince one another, but quarreling, like cheating, will only destroy whatever we have built up in our sense of nationhood or what has remained of it.”

The editorial ends with its sharp assertion and an appeal for statesmanship among voters:

“Politicians are not worth quarreling about!

“Think about it. Campaign and vote for the nation.”

Democracy is the synergy of wills of self-actualized human individuals. Premises for this include humans being conscious of their dignity and rights and asserting these individually and collectively through effective mechanisms for such assertion and administered by their chosen servant-leader administrators.

In healthy democracies, individual members of the human communities, as various scopes of constituency, consciously and voluntarily synergize their total humanity – their human bodies, their human minds and their human spirit. Minus any of these three, the reality of living democracy is greatly diminished.

There can be no real democracy if the people behave like slaves, not thinking for themselves, not making fully-informed decisions especially on how the synergy would best serve the rights of all based on the will of the majority, with due compassion and care for the specific legitimate interests of all the component groups, especially the special groups that are of the minority by reason of non-choiceful circumstances.

Synergy of will, collated and consolidated from an effective synergy of minds through a healthy process, should translate into a consensus of what the whole community should do at any given period. For the national community this would be the national long-range plan that should serve this entire community and its citizens fully.

For smaller component communities, whether territorially-defined or otherwise, there should be equivalent long-range plans. Actually, the plans of these smaller-scope constituencies should be the ones synergized as the basis of the national plan (contrary to what has become the pattern, the national plan should not be based on the order list of foreign creditor institutions as it has been usual practice!).

Ultimately, real democracy is based on the development and assertion of the will of individual citizens in homes and neighborhoods and villages.

Human intellect should afford working out short-term goals with clear indicators for success so that the goals would not be recycled repeatedly as hollow promises.

The process of working out these long-term and short-term plans must be fully and effectively participatory. No exclusions, no token participation passed of as a real synergy of all or almost-all the minds. This should be an earnest collective effort to search for the truths that will set us free from ignorance and from the separation that mires us all in the conflicts among narrow interests. In contention are here should be the bits of knowledge, analyses, insights and opinions of people, not a contest among persons who carry these bits of knowledge, analyses, insights and opinions as their very own.

The execution of the plans needs the synergy of actions of human bodies, the creativity of human minds and the enthusiasm of the human spirit. The best plan we can come up with collectively deserves to have a realistically effective plan of collective implementation, where groups and individuals would have clearly defined roles to play.

An important part of the implementation plan is choosing who would play which roles in the task of all to implement that plan.

Choosing specifically which individuals would do the overall orchestrating, which individuals would do the very specific planning, and who would lead in implementing the plans, whether by election or by appointment, is definitely an important component of democracy. This is why elections are very important direct acts of the people in a working democracy.

But if all the citizens are just in this focus, if all that the citizens do is to compare among reputations of persons presenting themselves for the various tasks, if all we do is blame all our woes on one reelectionist candidate or be hysterically afraid of what one of the challengers would do if he wins, democracy cannot be a reality.

It has become our habit as voters to compare among candidates on the basis their character reputations or even their minor misdeeds. For example, in asessing the performance of the late President-turned-dictator Ferdinand Marcos, we carry the belief that the volume of his alleged plunder accounts for the big impoverishment of our national economy, and fail to see that the much bigger adverse consequences of his approval of projects, programs and policies dictated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

For another example, we see only the clean personal integrity of ex-President Corazon Aquino, and fail to see that her policy position on debt repayment (to repay all the debts of the illegal regime of Marcos, without asking for even just moratoriums on these and cancellation of the clearly illegal and onerous ones). This policy has been the biggest single factor underpinning our annually growing government budget deficits and our plunging peso-dollar exchange rates. On her other acts, including ones that bordered on the treasonous (like her reported long-distance phone conversation with then Executive Secretary Joker Arroyo showing knowledge and complicity with the U.S. Embassy’s meddling in the work of the 1986 Constitutional Commission) I do not impute malice, either, but simply lack of good advice.

The point is that the voters should start looking into policies and programs promoted by the candidates. I remember that for the 2001 elections environmental groups organized an “electoral college” to evaluate the senatorial candidates of the administration and of the opposition, the organizers were saying that candidates of the just-deposed President Joseph Estrada could not score high in the evaluation (their inclusion in the evaluation was actually an afterthought) precisely because they were associated with Estrada who was supposedly a “gambler, drunkard and womanizer.”

While it is absolutely true that everything is interrelated in the seamless cosmic reality, that sort of criteria would have been more suited for a voter’s guide from the Moral Recovery Program. Ironically, that “green electoral college” favored the candidates of the then newly-installed President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who, as senator, had led the drive for the ratification by the Philippine Senate of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade or GATT, which multilateral treaty has wreaked havoc on the Philippine and global environment! At least she was not reputed to be “a “gambler, drunkard and womanizer.” Tsk! Tsk! Tsk!

The people should unite on the what’s before they can responsively and productively unite on the who’s. Or choose our who’s on the basis of the what’s they credibly espouse. Elections in parliamentary systems are done that way. The parliament can be dissolved upon a big national issue and a new one is created when the people choose their equivalent of congressional district representatives according to party affiliations which imply clear positions on the issue. That way the people themselves are directly voting on that issue.

The problem with our situation here in the Philippines has always been that the major political parties are basically identical, and our candidates are generally mum on real issues, on policy and platform issues. They would rather dance, sing, or do acrobatics like the “EDSA-I Ramos Leap,” and engage in character-assassination, but generally shy away from taking the issues by the horns.

And then our voters have had the habit of reelecting proven liars, candidates with recycled broken promises and recycled excuses for dismal performance, because these candidates convincingly appear winnable. We tend to favor fighting cocks that are llamado, which is why outgoing President Aquino chose to anoint Defense Sec. Fidel V. Ramos, her late husband’s jailer, over ex-Speaker Ramon Mitra Jr., her late ’s cell-mate, and why outgoing Ramos chose to anoint Speaker Jose de Venecia over his own protégé, former Defense Sec. Renato de Villa.

We have apparently lost all devotion to the value of truth and integrity. We have actually been gamblers not voters. And we admit it with amusement or even some sense of pride.

We should not limit our democratic right and duty to choosing which politician we would predictably be blaming later, specifically at the time of the next election period. But are we not doing precisely that? Can’t we break free from this impotent, even harmful, cycle that we dare to claim as “democracy”?

Can’t we make democracy work or at least personally behave during elections in a way the next generations would have reason to hold us in admiration and gratitude instead of holding us in contempt?

We should not be planning to remain in the cycle of blaming this candidate, fearing another, and voting for the “lesser evil,” over and over again for decades on end. Or, much less, betting on the winnable.

We should be planning instead on programs and policies that we need to implement with determination to really solve the problems of the nation. Remember: Failure to plan means planning to fail.  Failure to plan together and failing to plan to implement together mean planning to fail in the attempt to succeed together, in the attempt to be served and exalted together. Failure to consider the long-term problems of the country in search for really effective solutions, and just electing someone hopefully to be our “national redeemer” only to be crucified later, is not an exercise in democracy.

On those points I dare not attempt to improve on these words from my esteemed friend and colleague in the Academe, Prof. Nito Doria of the Social Research Center of the University of Sto. Tomas, who says in his introduction to an SRC-designed Seminar on Development Administration:

“If it is not yet too late, it ought to dawn on every concerned citizen, especially those in charge of social governance, that the failures of government that have now become an unenviable tradition cannot simply be blamed on those identified as trouble-makers, or as a result of widespread graft and corruption, but the result of no less than a systemic dysfunction in Philippine society. The need for a rational and systematic analysis of old notions and societal configurations, especially those that have come to be regarded without question as venerable institutions, in order to craft a strategy for national progress that will not require generations to take effect, itf this country is not to be overtaken by the development of more unwelcome and debilitating events.

“A meaningful strategy is simply impossible without a critical review of such institution whose analogy in the private sector are the standing policies that determine, for better or worse, the inner culture of an enterprise.” (underscoring in the original)

Of course we can be forced by circumstances to choose the “lesser evil” among candidates. But we can’t fool ourselves forever that in so doing we are voting in the context of real democratic system.

Because real democracy should have the capability to unite us behind plans, policies and programs, and also behind appropriate orchestrators, appropriate servant-leaders for these. It appears that we are not marching toward that sort of system.

In fact, because of the level of despicable corruption among politicians and voters alike, military officers in various groupings are increasingly being tempted to use this to justify their own grab for the power that Marcos had given them the taste of.

If commanded discipline were all that this nation needs, I would even consider supporting a slide back to such dictatorship. But considering everything, especially the essence, dignity and inherent capabilities of human beings who deserve to be actualized and synergized in a system of governance that befits humans. Humans are evolved beings that do not deserve to slide back to the logic and morality of reptiles (with apologies to the reptiles).

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