Easy there, political smartypants!

by pepevee

Partial election results are all over the news. Naturally, people are beginning to complain. Not that we ever stopped.

I’m no expert. I’m just thinking aloud here but I get it.  People hate what’s happening in the world of politics. Hating your country’s leaders is more mainstream than you think.

“That should be more like blah blah!”

“He/she should win!”

“He/she should lose!”

“Our country has no hope! The people are so stupid!”

Woah, woah, woah. Easy there, political smartypants. I know it feels great to call other people stupid. Makes you feel good about yourself, doesn’t it? Makes you feel supreme intellectual overlord of the political universe. But guess what? Calling someone stupid over and over again will not really help them become smarter. And you know what, it doesn’t make you any smarter either.

First time voters this 2013 elections are especially social media savvy. And noisy. We create a lot of buzz online. Flooding news feeds, creating threads, trending hashtags. I mean for a day the world of social media was drowning in a sea of purple fingernails. But what we have to understand is that this country is full of different people. Emphasis on the word “different”. Not everyone is like you and your Facebook friends, Twitter followers, or whatever you call people in Instagram. There is more to reality than your precious little social media sphere. And that sphere you call home of the intellectuals is a small percentage of the general Philippine voters’ population. So don’t be surprised if your online polls doesn’t match real world results. That’s not evidence of cheating. That’s called reality.

They say that “Nothing is more important to a democracy than a well-informed electorate”. And I believe that we all agree on that. So if we think that majority of voters aren’t educated enough to make a huge decision for their country, what do we do? Do we tweet about how stupid they are and how hopeless our country is and that we’ll just have to migrate someplace because we love our country but we hate our leaders? Hellz to the no, brothas and sistahs! We should instead try to educate each other.

One simple way is to elevate the level of discourse. We try to improve the way we talk about these sort of things. We try to speak more responsibly. We try to show one another, especially the media and our leaders, that what we want is a decent and intellectual handling of events. That what we want are real debates – debates that try to find out how knowledgeable candidates are about the state of our country, debates that are about issues and solutions, debates that showcase really important questions and not pathetic questions like who their favorite superhero is or who the hero of their life is because we tuned in to watch a political debate and not a beauty pageant. Let’s show them that we are not interested in mayoral candidates arguing like little children on live TV. Because it can be argued that they’re just giving us what we enjoy and want, let’s show them that we no longer want any of those crap. Let’s show them that we deserve better.

Joking about Nancy Binay’s skin tone doesn’t exactly contribute to our dream of a better discourse and more intellectual electorate. I know, jokes about the candidates are hilarious. But after a while, they lose their humor and creativity and things just get dirty and mean. How can we hope to improve the political discourse when we ourselves enjoy the shallow antics of the present system. Yes, some of our countrymen are not exactly well-informed. But it isn’t completely their fault, some blame is deserved by an imperfect system.

And that is why we must work to improve the system. Strive to elevate the status of politics in our country. Learn to understand that there is more to it than “stupid voters”. Learn to accept that things are much bigger than your own preference and vote. We are after all talking about the votes of a whole country. That’s called respect. That’s called democracy.

Soooo, what I’m saying is try to ease up on the jokes and throwing of the word “stupid”. I know I’m being a bit of a KJ here but if you’re up to it, let’s just try.