I was at our stall in the public market where we regularly got our house supply of liquid detergents, cleaners and bleach when I noticed their store front filled with election faces. I jokingly remarked “smiling faces all around in this area” in the vernacular, referring to the beaming election candidates in the posters before us. Mockingly she merely smirked and nodded like an imp. “The thing is, when the election is finally over and you come to them for something to be done, you’re always met with bureaucratic red tape at their offices. Some members of their staff are even discourteous.”
To lighten the situation, I went along with her in her dampened mood and feigning shock, remarked that what she experienced never ever happened to me. What’s worst, the officials I intended to visit (at least three times) were always never in the office (as reported by their courteous staff) and according to other people in our neighborhood, were never seen him anywhere or at any other time inside the local government building except during special days, and during city events at that.
Let’s stop there.
Honestly, we also have to give politicians the benefit of the dance. Or did I really mean doubt? To be fair, things are getting done, even if only categorically and as we might see it, in trickles, period. I would like to think that gone are the days of komiks and local movies, where there’s always the dirty and absentee politicians eternally typecast and caricatured with a thin moustache and playing the character of villain ad nauseam. Truth is, we only see things according to our confirmation bias. No one’s pure of thought nowadays; so that even first-year students are prone to be innocent recipients of the biases imparted by their professors-cum-political officers.
No matter, if you’ve family members who were voting for the first time, don’t you think it quite unfair if we pour down our negative opinions of the election processes on them? Instead we should at least indulge them only with positive reference experiences or none at all. Perhaps tell them about how you felt when you first voted; and how idealistic were during your youth in your choice of candidates.at the very least, we owe that to them.
As people nowadays are starting to believe in claiming and manifesting, let’s see what happens when we leave the young without our hang-ups.
