The world is good and beautiful. Yesterday, the weather was fair. There is a calm, an anticipation, some fear, a lot of prayer. But the world was good when I slept, and when I woke up, the sun was still bright, the cows were still mooing, the dogs still barking—the world is still beautiful.
The people in the world are not always good, and they are not always beautiful. Sometimes their human faces are twisted ugly by lies and corruption and greed. I've always loved Isabel. I loved it when I stayed here growing up, I loved it even more when I left for Cebu. The city can offer me no glamour or "classy" lifestyle, no temptation of the newest luxury restaurant or go-to place, no frequency of trips to Starbucks or Ayala that would make me choose all of the above for the quietness, for the dainty, bucolic solitude, that always welcomes me when I go home. In my heart, I will always choose this humble little town...and its quiet, humble people whom I thought, until now, had simple and childlike hearts.
But now I see them and I feel only disgust. I can't see their faces anymore, just their hands, eagerly and tightly clasping white envelopes with money in exchange for a vote. This has become so entrenched in how politics works in our town that it has wormed its way to become a permanent part of the electoral system—like a loose thread that looks very unsightly but bears the threat of undoing the entire system if pulled out. So it just hangs there, and people have taught themselves not to care.
I just didn't expect, however, the extremes to which greed would push some people. Go find a way to damage this man's campaign, make him disappear long enough for the people to forget his face, forget his name, forget what he's done. Plant a charge against him that will not allow him to post bail, that will make him fear imprisonment, that will paint his name and the rest of his family black. Make him and his family feel obscure, ostracized, ashamed. Find a woman desperate enough to cry wolf even when the wolves are the ones who are soliciting her for her cries. Get her to act against her dignity as a woman to destroy the dignity of a man. Whom she says is a pig, whom she says beat her and forced himself on her.
But you who know him know he can't even get up from sitting so long from a strained back, let alone raise his fist to a woman hard enough to give her bruises. You who know him know he is too gentle and kind and honorable.
But you don't know him. You don't know how he has worked hard, how much he has sacrificed. You don't know the pains he took to give you back, to raise again, what has been taken from you. You don't even know what was taken from you. Because you are ignorant. Because you only judge from what you see, from what you hear from wolves or from other people who are as ignorant as you are. But you have made your decision. You have cooked your meal, so hope you can swallow it without choking. You have made your bed, so hope you can sleep soundly and wake up the next morning.
You want goodness for this town, your family, yourself. Let's hope that's what you'll get.
