Why I Am Putting My Stakes on Gordon
Tomorrow, the Filipinos will partake in what I feel is a very important right and obligation for them— voting in the presidential elections. I have already done my share of the “absentee voting” at the Philippine embassy in South Korea a week before. That marked just my second time to cast my vote, yet I feel the need to express my more independent stance on life-changing political decisions like these at this time around. I guess this is what getting out from under your parents’ skirts do to you, much so if life has recently allowed you to physically leave a country you desperately want to go back to in the hope of reliving it with more realizable hopes and dreams.
I wasn't exactly a Gordon fan and by far have only associated his name with Red Cross and Olongapo, which is pretty much enough and polite, given how I personally think he has done great work over them to be rightly associated with. They are the few efficiently performed public service jobs from among the far more underperformed ones. So as much as I get spikes of hope from these efforts, they get easily thrown off by the resurging frustrations out of the greater inefficiencies that are magnified in my beloved Philippines. Then Gordon bannered this “will-create-jobs-at-home-so-that-Filipinos-will-not-need-to-work-abroad” in one of the earlier presidential forums that I caught online (thanks YOUTUBE), and I was suddenly stoked to him. You may have guessed it was some punch from my “homesick hormones”, having to say this at this current stance in my life right now-- working away from home-- or from some particular personal experience. You are partly right with that.
You see, I grew up always getting this special kind of excitement when meeting my father every time he gets home. Only that it’s not excitement that keeps me on-hold for the day so I could hand him his slippers when he arrives from work at night. It’s the kind of excitement held up for a year or two— the kind that lets me fetch him at the airport for his vacation. I am part of the many OFW families who know more than everybody else the pros and cons of being in one. And this is the best that I could come up with in weighing it: Trading your father’s presence in your school graduation for a new bicycle gift that this dad promises to give anyway. It makes you strive hard to compensate for feeling sad. I can’t say it’s an overly depressing state to be in. I won’t say it’s a nice situation to be in as well. Obviously, there are just some trade-offs in life. That’s just one plain, hard-core fact. Okay, okay, enough of the literary prose. I’ll try not to wear my heart over my sleeves now.
What the country need is someone who can EXECUTE in its most workable sense the plans of revamping this country, and not someone whom we can simply empathize with, over how sulked our country has become from so much democratic upheavals. We already know that. Now Gordon may really come off as a bit too rough with the speedy talks of his short tongue, but he speaks with feasible sense and with promising change. He has actually been accused of sounding desperate because of this, and I think he really is. He is just as desperate as I am in getting the Philippines back on track economically.
Of course every Filipino wants an end to poverty and corruption. They have been favorite electoral slogans of democratic nations for long decades that it is not surprising for a presidential candidate from an established "democratic" lineage to banner it just as well. So far though, the slogans have been merely FIGURATIVE, transformational changes, not backed up with ACTUAL, workable economic goals and objectives.
What Gordon presents are ways that actually makes you imagine him getting his feet up in the morning to go out and work. He said he wants investments to come into the country and so that’s what he’s only going to allow for his few foreign trips. And he’s the kind whom you feel will take that extra mile in doing such task. When he said he wanted foreign investments, he didn’t say he will visit countries. He said he will pursue investors, which if you think of it, is practically how the game is when you want to market your country.
I agree with Gordon’s recognition of what the country’s strengths and weaknesses are, and his steps in utilizing both for the country’s benefit. There’s his shotgun push for tourism to entice foreign investors, and there’s propping up nurses and teachers for the economic value that they deserve. While doubts arise on how Gordon can provide a 40,000/month of salary to teachers thru tax on sending text messages, don’t deny that it is actually an ingeniously practical idea of looking for funds for a very critical sector of a capital-impoverished country like the Philippines.
His proposal on providing 'Kindle' gadgets for elementary school children made some people say that Gordon’s platforms are the senseless, short-term type, making him a blind leader who is unable to see the bigger and long-term picture. I then dare ask what this ideology of looking out into a distant, corrupt-free future has done for the country. In 1986 when the Philippines restored democracy, it has since envisioned itself to be better in the future. The future is now and we are still deep in the rots. I then don’t care going through smaller but clearer steps to a dramatic change, that before we know it, is pretty much there.
I don’t mind Gordon bragging about what others think are miniscule achievements over Olongapo, if benchmarking on these will greatly help him set a greater landscape for the Philippines. And I don’t mind Gordon being arrogant or overconfident if that is the only way Filipinos can finally be disciplined and plodded to work for a better Philippines.
Right now, the country deserves not a president that it likes, but a president that it needs.
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