BY:DONALD SEVILLA

THE BARANGAY AND SK ELECTIONS: LESSONS WE NEVER LEARN

While successful, the recently concluded BSKE should have taught us more lessons than are intended and from experience.

We have been conducting electoral exercises as far as we can remember in our democratic journey, yet time and again, we are confronted by the same problems and issues. Rampant vote buying, partisanship and mudslinging, among others.

For the life of us, these seem to be the norm and all else are seen as abnormalities in our brand of politics.

While perceived by many to be dirty, yet we continue to engage and enjoy this dirty game in our quest for power and position in the noble name of public service. We are corrupting ourselves and exposing the younger generation to the evils of politics.

SK bets are getting sucked into the system as they, too, engage and mimic despicable practices of their elders.

But how many are truly motivated to serve others? Public service seems a tall order in a world defined by materialism and self- interest. Yet, we continue to bury ourselves in our hypocrisy justifying our behavior.

The truth of the matter is that we don’t feel bad at our actions for we never see it as horrible and offensive. We do not see it as buying votes but a token of appreciation to those who support us and to those who receive it, a symbol of belongingness to a group or a cause.

Thus appropriately termed as “inangayan” literal translation “fair share”, it defines one’s affiliation to a particular group or candidate, without which he can feel out of place or ostracized.

With this in our mindsets how can we eradicate the practice of handing out money or anything in kind to garner votes?

This explains why no matter how many covenants and pledges we sign for clean and honest elections, we always end up the same.

By now we should have matured in our democracy, but we are bound by our traditions and distorted mindsets. The level of sophistication by which we have amplified the practice has manifested itself in the form of Gcash and other high tech innovations.

Call it what you may,  the practice of handing out cash to voters could spark a bidding war between protagonists that may be favorable to the electorate but could have disastrous consequences in the long term. The more a candidate spends, the more he is susceptible to corruption.

In the barangay, while the most basic unit of our government and the smallest,  its election is most hotly contested. Supposed to be non-partisan, yet, in reality it turns out to be the most partisan of all.

So what then can we learn from our experiences? Unless we get rid of our hypocrisy and clear and replace our traditional mindsets, we can never grow.

We need to go beyond and above ourselves to break free from this bondage to mature, otherwise vote buying will be here to stay for much longer.