The deluge

Kinutil

One has to suspend disbelief to grasp it entirely but it is there in front of us. And we would see it much more clearly if ever we spent the day of the elections in a municipality somewhere in some distant provincial town. And we might as well give this town a fictitious name. Something exotic and mysterious, something sounding nice, something like Kadag-um.

At the end of election day in Lungsod Kadag-um, we see them, the people of the hills, dressed in Sunday clothes. They come down from the hills to vote. They go back home in the late afternoon before dark bearing on their heads bags of rice; in their arms, canned goods, bottles to drink, meats from the merkado. They shall eat a good supper tonight. And who are we to blame them for that?

It is the system, we should tell ourselves. It is the culture. And while both system and culture could still become better, one day perhaps, this is the way it is. And nothing we can do for now can change it. Change will come to us after decades of years of hard work from each one of us. It will not come from the empty promises of fools.

There will be a deluge of money come election day. And the money will seem to come from everywhere. And there will seem so much of it we must all wonder where it comes from. It comes indeed from everyone.

But here is how it works: In the days coming to election day the richest, most powerful, people of this country will feel each other’s mettle, will feel the wind, before deciding which particular candidate finally they want to lay the most money on.

The rich and powerful know each other. They might even be mostly friends. The rich and powerful have the most to lose if the wrong candidates win. And it is not as if they have no conscience. They are people like you and I. And they are not, all of them, stupid.

They know that if they let the country go to the dogs after all we have achieved so far, it will be a betrayal. For which betrayal they will not be forgiven, nor will they forgive themselves. Most of them are good people. They will do the best they can to make sure the country does not become impossible to govern.

And it is not a very complicated system. The outcome is not absolutely unpredictable. Still, the rich and powerful do not call the shots exactly.

A bit of chance, a bit of the random, will come into play. After all, it has been said: All politics is local. Thus, when the deluge begins, politicians everywhere will be deciding how much money flows, or as it were – trickles – down to the voters on the ground. Most politicians will want to keep as much money for themselves.

Greed is ever so pragmatic. But in the end, they will all know, which candidates the rich and powerful have chosen. Few candidates will throw everything they have fighting against the chosen winners. That would be like pissing against the wind. Better not to lose everything in the here and now.

The next elections, after all, are not that far away.

But even so, no one knows exactly who will win. There is the principle of uncertainty. Because people will vote on their own. The politicians cannot know for sure until after the counting who finally the people voted for.

Politics, especially politics by way of elections, is a gambling match. Nothing is absolutely predictable. Which is why so many love it so much.

Not the least of whom are the people of the hills. We are like them, no better, no less. We, too, have something to carry home with us after all these.

We will carry home with us our pretended innocence still intact; we, who did not sell our votes, who voted for the candidates we believed in, the candidates we thought were our most decent choices, the ones who fooled less the voters with their impossible ramblings.

We voted according to our conscience. But we will have to forgive everyone else their choices even as we must forgive ourselves ours. This is how we are. This is the way we vote.