A prescription for political addicts to keep their sanity

If you want to live long enough to keep doing battle for your choices of president for the next, say, five succeeding presidential elections, at least as far as your mental balance can be a factor in your overall physical health, then try to do at least these two things: Read political commentaries only for information or entertainment, never as sign posts to show the way. And don't get mad or you won't get a good night's sleep. You'll only get madder.

For example, if I say that most people have been regarding politicians the wrong way, you do not really have to believe me. It is not I who will suffer from your ignorance. Bwa ha ha. See? I did not mean that as a demeaning and condescending insult. You don't have to get mad at it. You might even learn to laugh with me in celebration of your ignorance. (It's maddening, no, when I use the language of "yellow" journalism?).

But while you may do as I say and laugh along, I am actually deadly serious about it being a big mistake how most people regard politicians. When people are for a particular politician, they regard him or her as the best, incapable of any wrong. But when they are against a politician, they see him or her as the epitome of everything bad, even as the devil incarnate.

The mistake here lies in allowing feeling to take precedence over thinking. This has always been mostly the case. Let us take Bongbong Marcos. He is not only a presidential candidate, he is the main issue in this election. Even his main rival, Leni Robredo, admitted to running on no other platform than to try and prevent the ascendancy of another Marcos to Malacañang. That is pretty hateful (a feeling) to me than clear thinking (knowing her abilities).

If people allow themselves to place feelings in the back burner and bring clear thinking to the fore, they will realize that all politicians are really all just the same. They will do whatever it takes to win an election. And as there is no perfect person, each politician is a mix of good and bad, with the prevailing mental picture of him or her dependent on where the people allow their feelings to take them.

Those who love Marcos will not listen to what those who hate him have to say. A common answer of the Marcos lovers to the dirty talk of the Marcos haters is "so?" or "so what?" And this can only drive either side to even greater heights of gleeful mirth or deeper depths of even darker thoughts and rage. Either way no one really ends up the wiser even if one may emerge the eventual winner.

Another mistake people make is in thinking of politicians as self-made and self-sufficient individuals we need to elect in order to serve us. But that is forgetting one very crucial element in the equation --the people themselves. People forget it is they who make the politicians. If fact, the extent to which politicians can push their inherent goodness or badness is entirely up to how much the people allow them the slack.

In other words, it is who the people are that the politicians eventually become. Politicians are a reflection of the people who elected them. I find it absolutely absurd, therefore, for the Marcos haters to think they are insulated and immune just because they happen to hate him. Wrong. The Marcos haters are as much a part of the problem they imagine themselves seeing.

Just look at how Robredo anchors her candidacy, which is to run just because a Marcos is running. What kind of a direction is that for her to take the country to? If she wins, all it means is that Marcos lost. And then what? Can you not see what kind of foolishness that is? If politician A is in because politician B is out, where does that place the country? It is dangerous to vote based on a feeling. People need to know where their leader takes them.