People who comment that I am naïve ARE naïve. They think I was born yesterday.
Half of my life I was a local newspaper editor (The Gold Ore, Baguio City Digest), national correspondent (Manila Chronicle, Malaya, Veritas) and international news and photo stringer (Kyodo News, Reuters) .
I have covered elections involving the last seven Philippine presidents. There was vote-buying in every one those elections. I’m not oblivious to it. Certainly am not making noise about it only now.
Vote-buying had always been a crime under the election laws effective during all those elections. I did not do enough research to be able to say that no one has ever been convicted of the offense. But if anybody ever was, I’m pretty sure it did not make the front page headlines. It isn’t shocking enough.
News is like that. All news is bad news. There are thousands of airplanes that take off and land safely around the world every minute, but it is only the one that crashes that makes the news.
However, it is not an excuse to think of vote-buying as “not serious” because it never lands in the news--just because very few people are ever prosecuted for it. Rape is serious. Rape is the most under-reported crime. Should we stop trying to eliminate rape?
I realize I have readers who are also lawyers like me, so I have to say this carefully with a lot of explaining afterwards: Vote-buying is actually a “complex crime”—if we go strictly by its definition.
A complex crime is one where two or more offenses result from a single criminal intent. It may also involve a situation where one crime is a necessary means to commit another.
Vote-buying is a complex crime in that sense. It is only the end transaction—just the tip of the iceberg. Where did the vote-buyer get the money? It’s never his own money. He stole it. How and where did he steal it? By plundering the public coffers. How did he get away with the plunder? By abusing his authority as a public official. Why wasn’t he caught? Because he conspired with many layers of the bureaucracy to facilitate it, as well as to cover it up afterwards. How did he get those other officials to conspire with him? By distributing—in fact advancing—proportionate shares of the proceeds of the crime to every participant. In short by corrupting his fellow public officers, replicating the corruption many times. How? Through bribery. By now, you must have you lost count already of how one crime became a “necessary means to commit” the NEXT of many more crimes down the line.
Vote-buying is that serious because it is not perpetrated by one individual. It is a systemic crime.
Vote-buying is not a victimless crime. It’s like heart disease. You see the unhealthy heart as the problem because it is often the only visible culprit in the post-mortem. You often do not see the billions of cholesterol molecules that caused the heart to fail in the first place. And you certainly deliberately miss seeing that delicious chocolate cake you’ve been eating for years before your fatal heart attack. That why you never saw the attack coming. How can you? The only early warning of a heart attack is sudden death.
Vote-buying is corruption. If you approve of it you are corrupt, too. You succumb to the seduction of enjoying lucrative gains that you didn’t deserve or work for. For the corrupting politician who lives by it, it becomes the very defining experience of his being in public office.
The briber and the bribe-taker both see nothing wrong with vote-buying because both have lost the ability to perceive it. On top of that loss of perception, they have gained the ability to rationalize it. When somebody assails it, they assail him back accusing him of being self-righteous in their fitful attempt to somehow pronounce themselves innocent.
The irony is, people think vote-buying is democratic (they actually mean socialist). It's Robin Hood stealing from the rich to give to the poor. That's why instead of being renounced as evil, it is applauded for its redeeming virtue of spreading the loot from a handful of complicit to a community of innocents. How can anyone be angry about that?
I call it the death of outrage--something I do not subscribe to. If I criticize vote-buying as pure corruption and you criticize me for criticizing it, why should I be ashamed? YOU should be.
Do I hope to change anybody’s mind? Hope, yes—but expect, no.
The story is told of a man who was alarmed at the deterioration of basic moral values in his home town. Instead of schools, libraries, museums, art galleries or churches being put up, more nightclubs, beerhouses, lewd massage parlors, gambling casinos and prostitution dens were sprouting all around town. Crime was up, teen pregnancies was burgeoning and deliquency at school was at an all-time high, all of this was countenanced by officials who didn’t care so long as the boom in business brought in revenues.
The man felt that the very social fiber of his community was decaying. So he made some hand-painted signboards and walked all around town bearing a placard that begged “Let’s Return to Decency, Let’s Fight Social Corruption!”
Everywhere he went people just shrugged their shoulders. Many laughed at him.
After doing this for a year, things did not get any better. Hecklers taunted him, “How’s it going old man? It’s been a year and you haven’t changed the mind of anybody by that stupid thing you’re doing! You’re wasting your time! Why do you still do it??”
He answered, “A year ago I started to do this hoping that people would change. It seems nobody did. So now I must continue doing this so that I would not change.”
You want to know about naïve? If you think all this “good projects” bonanza is an original invention by benevolent modern-day politicians, you should know they are copying Marie-Antoinette back in history, just before the French Revolution of 1789.
When the French peasants were going hungry and dissatisfied with the monarchy, she ordered the army to, “Give the people cake!”
All the pretty-looking “good projects” you are seeing now are political cholesterol slowly clogging up the heart of your community. The “good centavos” you are getting out of it now is not even a pittance compared the BILLIONS your fiendish benefactor is looking to stash away once in office.
And yet there YOU are thanking HIM!
If you can’t see it, YOU are naïve.***
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