It's been almost a week since elections were held in the Philippines, and there are already plenty of people saying that, far from breaking away from election fraud, the country has witnessed more cheating this year than ever before. I had the opportunity to witness the election process on Monday and, let me tell you, more things happen outside the polls than they do inside. People buying and selling voting power, fights that sometimes end up in someone dying, "misterious" electricity blackouts taking place during ballot counting, hundreds of leftist activitsts being killed or "disappeared" during the past several months... People waiting patiently during the whole day, suspiciously glancing around showing their lack of trust... And endless list of candidates and nominees with suspiciously similar names and even more suspiciously confusing and vague political programs. Oh! And don't let me forget about the ban on alcohol consumption, effective from the evening before the election until the night of the day after. I am still not sure whether the prohibition was meant to stop people from getting drunk and therefore casting "irresponsible" votes or rather to stop them from killing each other. Maybe one of my filipino readers can answer that question: Bakit po?What is becoming increasingly clear to me, though, as time goes by, is that politics in this country walk hand by hand with guns. And it's interesting to think that not so long ago that was also the case in Spain. We forgot fast enough, though, so we grew to take the opposite for granted. Or maybe, now that I think about it, we do not have the opposite, but rather a watered down and kinder version of the same story. And maybe it is that "kindness" what has paralyzed so many of us. Regardless of how hopeless things feel in the Philippines right now (and believe me, my personal degree of hopelessness is pretty much under zero), I realize that there is actually more hope here than at home. And when I say hope I do not mean hope for development, progress, or what we commonly refer to as a better life. I mean hope for getting in touch with ourselves and with what is happening around us. I feel that people in the Philippines are more clear than we are on the fact that disenfrachisment does not come from personal weaknesses or shortcomings but rather from a very well organized and calculated politic-economic set up. The more you are able to identify that, the more effective you are when it comes down to imagine a different scenario and the best way to get there. We have a hard time imagining a different scenario because we really believe that it doesn't get better than what we have. And that is both our blessing and our death sentence. Marx called it "false consciousness." I call it stupid denial or self-serving fiction.
I often struggle when I write in this blog. I do not want to fall into some kind of self-indulgent description of the hardships and sorrows of those Third World Brown People or perpetuate some kind of pornography of the poverty in Asia. I want to write responsibly about what I see, but I often feel that I am staying at the surface. I do not seem to be able to dig deeper than a mere somewhat poetic description of an exotic surrounding. I fear now, after thinking about it, that digging deeper than that would mean to look deeper inside myself, and that is terrifying. The question is, like someone told me yesterday, what keeps us going? And how far or into what direction do we want to go? And don't tell me that I must be really depressed in order to be asking these questions, because I am not. I am sad, yes, but not depressed. I am sad about what I see, but I am happy to be here. I am grateful for having been given the opportunity to take this trip, and I surely hope that my personal journey does not end once I get a plane back to Barcelona. I still have to figure that part out, though.
