You are who you vote: An attempt at profiling the electorate

I posted this first at Antipinoy.com, but comments made me realize that this is a very personal article, so I'll post it here:

Following a discussion on the shoutbox in this site, I decided to collect my impressions of presidential candidates for this election and attempt to profile their voters:

(More on Antipinoy)

The Trouble with Santino

Santino is the star of the ABS-CBN program "May Bukas Pa". He's based on San Marcelino Pan y Vino. He is a "miracle boy" who regularly speaks with Jesus Christ and creates miracles for people. It becomes such that the people want to steal him and make him slave away to make miracles at their bidding. It's a typical "miracle boy" story.

Santino though has a lot of adventures. They run from being kidnapped to being part of a buss hijack to being wrapped up in political campaigns. This program tries to show all the problems and issues in Philippine society. And Santino in the story provides the solutions for them.

And that's the trouble with Santino; he's the hero who does everything for them. He solves the people's problems for them. But the people don't want to solve their problems. And they depend on him for those solutions. They don't want to do it themselves. There are so many instances where the poor people themselves act insensibly and stupidly - probably some would say, much like real Filipino poor. However, I know better. The attitudes and actions of Filipinos here are not that realistic. It even shows rich people as evil or maligned - a typical representation in Filipino programs. Again, it is not accurate.

May Bukas Pa is another example of the dysfunction of Filipino culture. People just want to live with their problems, but do not want to solve them. If ever they want a solution, they want someone else to do it. It's a promotion of inaction by the people. If this is what people watch and it forms people's ideas about the country, then the program, like most of Philippines TV (in Manila at least), is doing harm. It is promoting false ideas about the country and about how people should act. Most ostensibly it provides the idea that we need a hero to solve our problems for us. And if he doesn't solve our problems, we can always boot him out with "people power."

When will our people ever learn. We should watch something other than this.

Can’t Pinoys be famous for anything else?

We always laud Pinoys who make it big with their talents and capabilities and not with their corruption and mistakes. There’s Lea Salonga who’s an internationally renowned singer. Charice Pempengco is yet another singer. Same with APL of Black Eyed Peas and Jasmine Trias. Of course, there’s Manny Pacquiao in boxing, and Bata Reyes and Django Bustamante in billiards. The latest is Efren Penaflorida, whose CNN award can be considered controversial, but Pinoys make a fiesta of it nonetheless. But besides this, we hear little of other Filipinos who are lauded abroad… and rarely are other achievements mentioned than these.

Isn’t there anything else the Filipino can be known positively for? It’s always a boxer, singer, dancer, actor, sportsman or similar who becomes known. We have not heard of a Filipino biotechnologist, nuclear physicist, sci-fi writer, fantasy writer, manga artist or anything else. Of course, one can say that the Philippine science and technology field is so neglected. But who cares in this country? Most Filipinos want to be famous entertaining or punching somebody while raking in the money, instead of finding a cure for AIDS or submitting a program for solving poverty in his home country. And those Filipinos who are trying to find a cure for AIDS or solving poverty, seem to be pushed into the background or out of the country.

This seems like shameless plugging, but I’d like to use myself as an example. Back in 2002, I joined a sci-fi Yahoo group where I later found a publisher calling for submissions. I dropped in some of my short stores, and thus Gate Way Publishers came out with my short story collection, SFRP2003. I’m not really earning much from this. But it is one achievement I feel proud of. And it’s something different from being a singer or boxer. But it hasn’t created waves in the world.

December Blues

(Also posted on my Deviant Art Journal)

Time flies and it's December already. I think it's felt faster because I've been so glued to this computer doing both work and play. I'm so itched to draw manga that I've lost interest in my scale modeling hobby. Maybe I could do that when I get to Singapore, if ever I get a job there.

On Wall-Pissing and the Positive in our Country

On the now defunct Filipino Voices site, I responded to a post by the commenter Bert, who in turn replied to Get Real Philippines blogger Benign0:

Okay, benigs, glad to oblige.
I don’t know about you and your group, but these I’m going to blurt out here are my perspective of what are positive and beautiful about my country and my people.
1. The people. I am a good family man, benigs, and my family is a happy family. Take out some here, and some there, by and large, that’s about the embodiment of the typical Filipino family. I live in an environment of a happy neighborhood, not as clean and impecable as might be there in Australia, but my neighbors, we know each other, and we care for each other, and while you may see the next guy a pisser on the wall, I see the same guy who can be relied upon to help when I’m down and need one. And I to him.... (quote snipped)

I decided to jump in and say this piece:

Loving one’s country is easy… the country doesn’t do wrong, it’s the people who do. And loving people (the wrong way) is too easy when you blind yourself to their faults and don’t take them to task on it. Yes, let’s look at the positive and the beautiful, but never use them to hide the negative and unsightly. If you can use a garden as an analogy, a gardener snips out out the unsightly rotten branches, leaves and weeds. He leave only the beautiful by snipping out the ugly and harmful. Unfortunately, our people are not into doing that for their country; they prefer letting the unsightly stay alongside the beautiful, and say that it’s still beautiful. And in the end, that’s ugly.
If you let that guy piss on a wall, he’d better be dependable all right when he’s called to clean up his mess. And logically, that wall pisser is less likely to be a dependable person when you’re down, since he has the gall to piss on someone else’s wall instead of his own, and that means he’s willing to let other people down for his own comfort! If I were that guy’s friend, I’ll keep pestering him to stop pissing on walls. Would you let him piss on your wall?

My afterthought was that sometimes, yes, you may forgive people for their doing wrong. But this gets mixed up with glossing over their faults. Yes, sometimes you may gloss over a little fault, but one must never gloss over it forever. It would be better to keep pestering the person to stop doing this fault.
And in addition, people would never gloss over government's fault, but they regularly miss their own and other people's faults. I guess that's the problem with the Philippines; it's never the people's fault, it's always the fault of the one up there or another person. That only means our people are selfish and lazy. And since our politicians also came from these people, they remain the same.