Foreword

The right to an educated, defensible vote.

I get a glimpse of wrinkles of why’s often in my attempt to explain this advocacy. It’s useless, they say. The government’s corrupt anyway. It stings when told it’s hopeless. No, it hurts. One, because of its undeniably partial truth. We rate first, second, third most corrupt; first, second, third poorest. I see the sad roots of this remark. Two, however, is because the remark’s even sadder. You’re in your 20’s or 30’s and, already, you have dampened your own spirits, failed to see hope, given up on my home, and taken a passive non-stand (because that’s no stand at all) on the crux of the nation that affects, at the very least, your lifestyle, at most, your life, despite any amount of resistance on your part.

Forgive my indulgence in emotions. I love my country. It’s my home. It hurts when foreigners critique it; it’s insulting when my countrymen give no due respect for it. At the very least, have hope.

This is why we say, vote. Let us exercise our right because by some twist of fate, with our own share of responsibility, we might just be able to give to Leonidas a seat in government and inscribe in the pages of history and literature the greatness of our generation. The true spirit of elections, lest we forget, is change. And as much as every election period bears signs of the evils of the past, in the hands of the youth it may just be the means to a brighter future.

After all, the youth is a force to be reckoned with. Statistics show that for the 2007 elections, about 40% of the 43 million registered voters are under the age of 30. The United Nations Development Programme forecasts this number to rise to 72% in 15 years. The youth are an integral part of any society, but these numbers suggest this is truer in the Philippines than in most other countries.

The youth is the source of hope. Our optimism, paradoxically combined with inherent rebelliousness against the present, dictates change. But where the statistics above show how much we can do on the 14th of May, it also shows how much is standing in our way. The chief impediment, it appears, is ignorance – as much as we can blame the system for not arming us with bullets of information, in the final analysis, we have only ourselves to blame for the complacence to find out what we need to know.

As we perform the principal act of democratic citizenship, let us give testimony to the maturity of the youth and our readiness to take the reins of this nation. Have an educated vote, go beyond accepting apparent information. Study it like it’s an academic requirement, analyze the data as if it were for a thesis. And then decide. Decide such that we can defend them with reasons. Think logic. Go beyond personality and faces and the sound of the name. Think logic. All that are presented in this book are facts. All facts. Now, let us do our job and connect the dots. Decipher, decide, and defend. While suffrage is a fundamental right; an educated, defensible vote is the responsible exercise of such right.