Election fever

Election fever is up again, and here we go again.

A lot of new movements and organizations are on the rise. Dinky Soliman’s Change Politics Movement has been formally launched. So are DDB Group’s Ako Mismo, a youth group of Fr. Robert Reyes and ABS-CBN’s Ako Ang Simula. Personally, I look at these organizations as a healthy democratic practice. I even signed up with Ako Mismo, because I believe in their advocacy.

The only concern is, while these and perhaps more groups will be launching one after the other, can’t we get our acts together? I am concerned for more impact and results of the efforts we are doing. And since we do not unite under one umbrella, chances are the 2010 elections will just be as divisive as the ones before, resulting to an elected government by plurality which will in the end be “more of the same.”

Even in politics, the trend is the same. There are so many political parties, each having their own candidates. It is a predictable future – déjà vu 1998 and 2004 – elected leaders that do not possess what we have been ideally telling our people to choose because the mass electorate is just as confused as we are.

It is even sad that everyone is capitalizing on the young, especially the first time voters. I hope that in the process we do not frustrate their idealism, just as how much frustrated we, their elders have become – of the system, the politicos and society in general.

Really sad that we cannot find a good rallying point among the crops of leaders that we now have. There must be a miracle - a miracle that will open our minds and really see what and who do we need in these trying times when the economy is in bad shape, when peace is so elusive, poverty is so pervasive, injustice abounds especially victimizing the most vulnerable of our women and children, and the environment is in such a state that threatens our very existence.

But hope springs eternal. It is still barely a year before the 2010 elections, so let us keep praying for that miracle.