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Tuesday, October 13, 2015

When There’s No Good Choice

October 13, 2015
by Paul Farol
Just a short one before I go to sleep after a long day of battling a pretty bad case of writer’s block and then a bit of a high fever after overdoing my cardio routine on an off day.
demotivation.us_Choices-Sometimes-there-are-no-good-ones-left-1Right now it’s pretty apparent that the choices we have for President in the 2016 elections seems to be pretty uninspiring for most of the people in the GRP community.
Well, to be sure, there was a bit of a rave over the Duterte-Marcos team up but that was put down today after the Davao City mayor nixed a run for the Presidency with what seemed like finality.
Personally, I think the idea of a return to some kind of iron-fisted kind of governance is kind of boring to me now because that just looks like short-cutting the more difficult but necessary longer term work of fixing the dysfunctions of Filipino culture that will have a more lasting effect.
You see, you can cow people into obeying the law and all that, but once people are fairly certain that the enforcers have their backs turned you can count on the people to go back to their old ways.
The 20 year Marcos Regime, which some people hail as a golden period where discipline reigned, ain’t all that it’s cracked up to be. It was supposed to have instilled the Bagong Lipunan culture through government controlled media and other measures. But you know what? It took less than a couple of years for that supposed culture to disappear — then again, like most Marcosian propaganda, maybe that culture never really took root.
What some people fantasize about, in terms of fixing Filipino cultural dysfunctions, would probably resemble what the citizens of North Korea are experiencing. And really… that ain’t fixing a dysfunctional culture but merely replacing one set of dysfunctions with another.
So, anyway, right now you have a choice between Grace Poe, Mar Roxas, and Jojo Binay — nope, we aren’t going to consider the other lesser clowns who showed up at the Comelec today.
Among the three, only Grace seems to be the wildcard and that is largely because her short track record as a public servant (as MTRCB Chief then Senator) doesn’t give much of an indication of how she will perform as the country’s Chief Executive. On the other hand, we know pretty much what to expect from the others with Mar’s presidential bid is pretty much burdened by the failures of the Aquino Administration and with Binay’s bid is saddled with a possible corruption case which some suggest might keep him from actually running.
I guess, no matter how you vote in the coming elections, all the choices will have a downside to them.
Then again, think about it, there are rarely instances when choices don’t have an apparent downside to them. So, what people really ought to do is just make a choice knowing the downside to each candidate and prepare to deal with the downside.
The only question is, which downside do you think you can handle better?
A. Inexperienced
B. Incompetence
C. Complete lack of integrity

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