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Opinion

The truly deserving

PERSPECTIVE - Cherry Piquero Ballescas - The Freeman

Sincere congratulations to the genuinely deserving, authentic public servants who won in the last elections. To the genuinely deserving, authentic public servants who lost, special congratulations, heartfelt thanks and applause for offering your time and service to your constituents.

To the undeserving winners who resorted to vote-buying or other dishonest means to cheat, we lift you all in prayers for God's justice to be upon you.

We offer thanksgiving prayers for the God-guided voters. To those who sold their votes, may you all deserve your type of leaders and their style of governance.

Our people remain trapped in a political culture of enslavement to the undeserving elected and their dynasties that they cannot see their poverty, material and moral, as linked to this deceitful patronage system. Our people also cannot see their liberation and freedom in terms of breaking away completely from the undeserving, abusive masters.

When and will our people ever learn to free themselves from vote-buying and patronage?

Every election, there are those who remain in hope that,finally, the voters will free themselves from vote-buyers and the undeserving candidates.

Vote-buying and election fraud remain as the norm until now but, although faint, hope has slowly flickered among those who voted for the deserving candidates, those who bravely refused to sell their votes, those who elected the truly deserving based on merit, not on patronage. Our gratitude and prayers to these voters - the true models for our youth and our people - who are slowly but surely taking the fearless path to truth and justice.

There were those among the sick, the elderly, and those from distant areas who went out of their way to cast their votes. In contrast, the macho Du30 did not vote, giving the lame, pathetic, unconvincing reason that he did not want to offend the candidates who were his friends.

Did Du30 think his one vote could elect or defeat a candidate? Could he not have gone to the precinct and secretly cast an empty ballot to show respect and impartiality to his candidate friends? By doing so, he would have shown respect for this very precious right of suffrage. But true to form, DU30 once again shows his total belief in his own absolute power to make or break any candidate. Being absent from the poll, DU30 also manifested his continuing disdain and disrespect for rights and the laws of this land - an undeserving role model for the young, an unworthy representative for law-abiding Filipinos!

Moving forward, beyond elections, will life for our people in the various barangays all throughout this country be better, be more just? Again, we raise our prayers to God to guide the deserving and undeserving elected to His path of truth and justice.

Until now, many of our people may think that life is unfair, that the honest and deserving end up losing, while the boastful and the wicked come out victorious and prosperous. Those who believe in and are committed to God struggle through trials and challenges while " those who don't care about Him seem to do well in life" - candidates cheat, buy votes, and win, the hardworking remain poor, the lazy undeservingly get the millions and power!

Psalm 73 (v.17) writes that in God's presence and perspective, at judgment time, we will understand their end. We won't be jealous about the undeserving winners when, according to D.De Haan, "all wrongs will one day be set right, by God who sees both bad and good; all motives and all deeds will then be fairly judged and understood.

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VOTE BUYING

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