Honest and decent men have no place in the dirty games of Philippine politics. They are like Don Quixotes delas Mancha who is bold enough to challenge the windmills of a corrupt, traditional and transactional kind of politics. But they do not have the thick wallets, the thick stomachs, and the thick faces characteristic of trapos. And so, they will always end up eating the dust of defeats and debacles. They have neither the will nor the means to buy votes, to bribe election officials, to terrorize voters, and to cheat via the counting machines. They always play by the rules and they always end up beaten and eaten by the conscienceless, unscrupulous, shameless, and callous tradpols.
Honest and decent men do not win in clean and peaceful elections because they do not want to buy votes and they rely only on the merits of their platforms of government and the nobility of their intentions. They do not want to solicit financial support from businessmen and industrialists, and do not seek the endorsements of the high priests in Philippine politics. They run like they were candidates for the supreme student council posts in an exclusive school. They believe that their speeches are enough, and that the voters would rally behind their candidacies on the sheer merits of their proposed plans and programs. They are too idealistic as if this world is some kind of a magical Nirvana or Shangri-La inhabited by angels and saints.
Honest and decent men do not win in the kind of elections in the Philippines because they do not have the stomach to engage in terrorizing voters. They have so much respect for the dignity of each elector that they do not wish to tinker with their freedom to make independent choices according to their conscience. Honest candidates are going to lose because their opponents use all kinds of maneuvers and tactics to sow fear among the voters, to buy them and warn them of serious consequences to themselves and to their families if and when the tradpols’ candidates do not win.
That is why we always end up electing corrupt officials because the electorates are themselves also corrupt. They expect to be bought, to be fed, to be picked up by vehicles owned or operated by the dirty politicians. A nation with a decaying sense of morality and with twisted values of materialism, consumerism, and greed does breed an officialdom that is equally if not more crooked in moral values and an entirely distorted sense of propriety and reason. That is why the whole nation deserves s corrupt set of leaders because most of the people are themselves tainted with corruption.
Honest and decent men do not win in Philippine elections because the whole electoral system has become too dirty, despicably dirty that any attempt to touch it with some wand of idealism would only create more pains and more dirt. Perhaps, it is time to find another option without destroying the nation, much less hurting the people more.