Desperately, undo

By Munding Salao

“See? Crime now has gotten worse than before! Not like during our time when crime was low.” Sure ka?

I think the real question is: Did crime indeed get worse because systems have changed? Or is all this escalation of crime a result of a culture that normalized killing as a corrupted form of vigilante “justice”? Was this a result of how the past couple of years tipped over our moral compass so much that we, as a people, have become an abomination of our former selves?

Let me try my best to examine some aspects of society and politics. I know a lot of people are complaining about “how stupid” our politicians are now. But isn’t this a culmination of how we’ve been letting our guard down on choosing who our leaders would be? Decades ago, we let actors and/or comedians get into the upper echelons of political leadership, and a couple of them, not all, have indeed proven their worth. They have surpassed expectations and have evolved into proper statesmen. But then, as time went by, it felt like the system got saturated, our filters got broken, and soon there were just too many jokers in the house who became a crippling liability to the country. In my opinion, it felt like it got worse a few years ago when there was this sudden flood of too many odd personalities who got into top government seats, from sexy stars to charismatic cult leaders. It would’ve been nice if they became the kind of statesmen that our poverty-stricken nation needed, but they just remained the odd jokers who did nothing of actual value for Filipinos in general. It’s a madhouse. Worse, these people, despite how corrupt and counterproductive they are as leaders, used their charisma to scam a large chunk of the population into worshipping them so they could maintain a foothold of power and influence in the political and societal sphere.

“Welcome to the Philippines, where the grocery baggers, cashiers, and security personnel are college graduates, while the nation’s top two leaders are a college dropout and a computer illiterate,” reads a Facebook meme I saw recently. In our lovely country, any joker can run for the highest position. No diploma, no civil service eligibility, no job experience. Literally anybody can run for the highest government leadership positions in our country. Positions that can dictate whatever fate happens to our country rest on what basically feels like a mere popularity contest. Worse, it seems like nobody’s passing legislation to correct this flaw in our system because of forces that cultivate this stubborn ignorance that exists in our society.

And cultivating ignorance … let’s call it stupidity na lang coz mas bagay. Cultivating stupidity is paying off well for many. Your stupidity is the human barricade that protects evil politicians from being held accountable for their crimes. Your stupidity makes you angry when there is an attempt for the wheels of justice to do their job. Your stupidity makes defending criminal politicians a priority instead of defending what is good for the nation. Your stupidity normalizes criminal politicians doing actual crimes — stealing, killing, bribing, destroying.

Remember last election and in the one before that, when we joked about barangay officials “stealing” money from the intended amount to be used for vote-buying? We joked about how they were supposed to give out PHP 1,000 to each household but gave away PHP 500. We normalized the expectation of receiving money during elections. Can you believe that? We normalized that sh1+. We normalized it into a joke. When you think about Filipinos from 50 years ago or older, how they would expect future generations of Filipinos to become, maybe only then would some of us realize: We should be ashamed of ourselves.

We normalized a lot of horrible things in the last couple of decades. A couple of years ago, we normalized having a foulmouthed demeanor because our then-president was foulmouthed. Sure, many of us might have been childishly snickering back then and letting it slide. But when you think about it, you can’t deny the repercussions it had on our society’s culture. I’m not surprised if some might say that personalities like that foulmouthed vlogger and several other toxic social media celebrities have been inspired by this unpleasant influence.

So in this current age of finger-pointing and faction-warring, one should take into account how we all got here in this mess. How we got too many jokers running the country. How too many people are supporting them. How our way of thinking as Filipinos has become bastardized over the years. The world is a mess. Mahal na gid ang gas. Too many people are being beaten down by poverty, which results in a lot of crime and unrest. We desperately need to undo several decades of cultural and moral degradation. Or it will only get worse.