By this time tomorrow, over 50 million Filipino voters would have already cast their vote. It is the culmination of months of rigorous campaigning by those vying for the over 1,800 open positions in the national and local government, which ended yesterday evening, with today characterized by a relative respite from all the noise and fanfare. It is the calm before the storm, and what a storm it is bound to be.
The importance of tomorrow’s events simply can not be overstated. So much has already been said and done heading into the race in support of and in opposition to candidates and their platforms, with social media becoming particularly toxic in recent months.
We’ve fallen so susceptible to cognitive biases that make us search for or interpret information only in a way that confirms what we already believe about our chosen candidates, or make us see others as more gullible to cognitive biases that we ourselves fall prey to. We end up creating echo chambers by surrounding ourselves with only like-minded people, shutting out those who think differently and treating them as the enemy.
These lead us to see the elections as an us-versus-them affair, and while this may be true for the candidates themselves, it is different for us, the electorate. We forget that we all want what we think is best for the country, but differ in what our definition of the best is. And this is worrisome because the presidential election is split in five ways, meaning that no matter who wins tomorrow’s polls, there will be a significant number of people — supporters of the other four candidates — who will be disgruntled at best and enraged at worst. The same goes for the six-way vice presidential race and the 50-way senatorial race.
When the dust clears from the elections and the votes have all been tallied, it is important to reflect on who the real winner is. The elections are, after all, a democratic process by which nations choose their next leaders. We all win together, or we all lose together.
It has been a whirlwind of an election season. Passions have run high and rightly so. But having said that, it is also important to point out that the passion we’ve more or less been showing for our country’s betterment — through participating in small and large conversation, reading and posting on social media, and monitoring what candidates say in interviews and debates — should not end tomorrow.
This level of participation and interest in the welfare of our country is the one source of hope that can very well extend past the elections, no matter who wins. The challenge for us then lies not just in choosing our leaders, because the bulk of that depends on what will happen tomorrow. But it lies in sustaining this engagement and making sure it is long-term, resisting the distractions of everyday life that have, for the most part, made it easy for this involvement to dissolve like it did in the case of Mary Jane Veloso, who to this day, for all our righteous anger and online ruckus, waits on death row.
The act of voting every election season should not be the only avenue for us to decide our country’s future and work towards its welfare. It is of utmost importance to make sure that this energy is not fleeting, that we pay this much attention for the next six years, calling out government wrongs consistently, caring about the Philippines and being the citizens it deserves. Because inasmuch as a country is a reflection of the performance of its government, the government is also a reflection of its people.
