Politics are in the air lately. Surely the days of waving banners, open rallies, and lousy candidate debates are coming near. The election is less than a year and parties are gearing up their candidates as well as their wallet, I guess.
I do have a funny feeling that election is just the same like lousy talent search television shows. How can I don’t have that feeling? The scenes are just alike: waving banners, cheering your candidates in front of the crowd, hearing and watching whatever they want to say or do. No matter they’re lousy or not, you won’t know or care about it. After all, they are your candidates, aren’t they?
Then the votes go in. But instead of voting via sms or phone call, you walk to a designated place, register yourself, receive a piece of paper (a large piece of paper due to numbers of choices available), cast your vote, insert the paper to a box, dip your finger in ink, go home proudly because you have exercised your utmost right as a citizen, and wait for the votes to be counted.
Okay, there’s more to an election than talent search shows. It is advisable to raise protests if your party lost the election. Otherwise you’ll be walking with a big “L” on your forehead. Not to worry, plenty of reasons can be used: money politics, faulty boxes, “pre-voted” paper, miscalculation, and so on. The list could go on indefinitely as long as someone has the creativity to create whatever reason to question the vote result. This cannot be done in Indonesian Idol, for example. Through this mechanism, the outnumbered parties can at least stamp their existence in our political map. Raise my hat, I will, because they fight until the end like a lion. For what reason, that’s something I don’t know. Perhaps they’re fighting for their mortgages which they can’t pay unless they won the election. Just a theory, don’t take it by heart. However, if you do take this statement by heart, let’s do a high five.
Even if your candidate finally lost the protest (not to forget the election, so it’s a double blow), let’s not be downhearted. There are literally hundreds of issues to be argued throughout the next 5 years. And what’s even better it’s that you could team up with your past opponents, which I presume also lost both the election and protest, to nudge any government policies to stamp your existence and says: I am not yet defeated!
Ah, even losing the election (and the protest) has an advantage. Say what you want to say. Since you’re not in the government, at least someone will not condemn you as a non-action-talk-only kind of person. If someone asks you how you will do whatever you’ve just said, just talk around a bit more, create a little confusion, and conclude by saying: that’s why I was against the election result. The objective is to prove that the government is wrong. There’s no need for you to prove that you’re right, let alone proving what you’ve just said might work. And come to think of it, why must you prove what you’ve just said? You’ve confused them, anyway.
But when it comes to the result, election and talent search are slightly different. If I think about Indonesian Idol graduates, all I’m asking is that where are they? What have they done? Of course, they pop up every now and then but nowhere that I can remember. With the “election graduates” at least I know where they are. If they’re not inside the house, then grab a newspaper. And in newspaper also you will know what they’re doing. They seem to appear a lot lately, decorated with headlines that read “graft”, “corruption”, “gratification”, “prosecution”, and numbers of bleak terms. At least those “election graduates” are getting more spotlight than the Idol graduates.
Don’t judge a book by its cover, anyway. One or two crooked persons don’t mean that the rest are just the same. A diamond in the middle of a dung pile is still a diamond. The problem is that there’s just too much dung for the diamond to be notified. If you can’t see the diamond, you won’t pick it up, you can’t sell it, and your total benefit of the diamond is zero. And the diamond is useless.
How hard it is to differentiate between a pile of dung and a diamond? Most kids don’t know what diamond looks like, but they certainly can tell what a pile of dung smells like. The pile will smell nothing less than a pile of, well, dung. Why can’t we? I guess that’s another point from election which talent search shows don’t have: the art of making a pile of dung looks like a diamond, at least during the campaign period. Let’s vote then, shall we?
hey, just to add on the voting thing. there’s this thing called “donkey vote” in OZ where you go into the box and just write “1,2,3″ according to whose names go first on the election paper. not so much of voting on talent shows but this creates a great advantage for whose name is on top of the list. porbably we should do this? dont cha think? it will make the “dung” even more interesting
By: belongimbal on July 16, 2008
at 5:59 am