Sambong, Sample Ballots, and Simpler Times

By Ricardo E. Escanlar III

To say that most people within my circles were disappointed with the results of the 2022 elections would be an understatement.  All the work that was done to restore and maintain a constitutional democracy in this nation felt undone. However, while this is a piece reminiscing about the elections, I won’t be revisiting 2022. Rather, I’m writing about the first time that I cared about the elections. I’m going back to 1992, when I was three years old.

1992 as far as I remembered it was the year of the Barcelona Olympics, where Roel Velasco won a bronze medal in boxing. It was also a year when rampant brownouts plagued Metro Manila. In pop culture, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Chicago Bulls dominated. Perhaps most notably, it was the last year of Cory Aquino’s term and the first presidential elections post-EDSA.

I knew who Cory was; I remember having a small poster at our house displaying all the presidents, with Cory at the center of it, so I knew she was president; I also had a vague idea of what People Power was and happened during the regime of the president before her.

Note that my parents and family members did not have any discussion of politics with me, or what EDSA or Martial Law was. But I already knew how to read at that time. Even better, I knew how to eavesdrop at older people’s conversations. A Marites in the making, one might say nowadays. And the good thing about being a child is that while adults will avoid using bad words around you, they will drop their filter when talking about political, social and economic issues- perhaps believing that the topics would be too deep for children’s comprehension skills. And I suppose three year-olds are impressionable, and I was not an exception to that. Hence I took in as much information as my tiny brain could process.

I do recall that the news was always on our television, whether it was TV Patrol at 6pm or The World Tonight at around 10pm, as perhaps expected from most households around election season in those days. I remember Christian Monsod being on the news always, and thus I thought he was kind of important. To be fair, he was.

For my recollection of my opinion on the presidentiables at the time, I remember in particular Ramon Mitra because I had a fever one time, and someone in the house told me that I had to drink this herbal drink called sambong to cure my cough, and Mitra drank sambong. I actually hated the taste of it, but for whatever weird reason this positively changed my view of Mitra, and thus he gained my “endorsement” for president.

I also remember that my family supported Miriam Defensor-Santiago. I knew that Miriam and my family were both from Iloilo, so in my mind that was the reason why they supported her. Also, anyone who remembered this particular election would recall that Miriam held the lead for days, when all of a sudden Fidel Ramos overtook her. That time, I checked the front page of the newspaper daily to see who was leading, and it was Miriam for the longest time. I remember getting confused as to why Ramos was proclaimed the winner when Miriam held the lead for so long.

I was also confused that Danding Cojuangco wasn’t being supported by Cory given that, according to my mother, they were related. It didn’t make sense to me, at least based on my idea of how families should be at that time.

I wondered why the late Doy Laurel was last in the tally when he was the incumbent Vice-President; I thought as a kid, hey, aren’t Vice-Presidents supposed to be popular? Up to this day I have no idea where I got that logic from.

Lastly, I remember already knowing at that time that Imelda Marcos was the wife of that president who got removed through People Power. I could tell based on my family’s conversations whenever she appeared on the news that they didn’t like her.

For the vice-presidential elections, all I can recall was my family finding it ridiculous that an actor would win. And that, based on what I remember from reading the newspapers, that actor won by a huge margin.

As for the senators, I remembered a candidate named “Vic Ziga”. I thought that was funny because the thought of a “siga” or street tough being a senator was somehow funny for my juvenile brain. I remember in particular this one time when my mother and I were riding a jeepney and someone handed us a sample ballot. At the end of the senators’ list was “Ziga”. I pestered my mother to vote for Ziga. She said no. I cried. I then asked her if I could vote, so I could vote for Ziga. She also said no. (I had no knowledge of Article V of the 1987 Constitution at the time.) I cried again. At that point, fellow passengers were looking at us. I wasn’t sure if they were looking at us because I was crying or because they were weirded out by the sight of some three year-old wanting to vote.

I suppose there is some nostalgic reason as to why I am writing this. Perhaps it is to affirm to myself that I have cared about elections and this country’s welfare for a long time, and not just last year when it seemed like everything was at stake. Perhaps it is to return to a time when the strongest candidates for President- Ramos and Defensor-Santiago- were both competent and deserving of the position. Or perhaps it is to hearken back to a simpler time in my life, when, as a child, everything, including the elections, seemed “fun”, and there was no need to think about policies, or track record, or loyalty to the Constitution, or any consequences of my actions in the decisions I make; when there was no need to worry about the possible negative effects of poor ballot choices on foreign policy, labor, the economy and human rights, and I could just pick a candidate based on a drink or a cool-sounding surname.

But then again, actual adult voters have come up with worse reasons to vote for candidates.