The rules of the game

Not all politicians are dirty even if the game of politics definitely is. One imagines there are good politicians out there who mean well. The problem perhaps is that the game itself plays out with a set of inescapable rules. People seeking to play the game need to get their fingers a bit dirty. How dirty? It all depends on how much power one wants and how quickly one wants to get it. This is simply how the game is played.

And this would be the root of corruption here. Politics requires money. Money is ordinarily hard to come by unless one has figured out the method for making lots of it. This, without getting caught. But this fact is not new to us. We knew it all along. Its most obvious indicator is the fact you hardly see any politician winning who does not win because of money. And why are there no senators or congressmen who are truly poor?

Thus, it must be said that this collective national outrage in the wake of the pork barrel scam is something worthy of close scrutiny. How and why did it happen? After all, there have been similar events before this which gave evidence of the inherent corruption of the political culture. So why should this be any different?

The outrage resulting from the pork barrel scam does not result from a discovery of something we did not already know. If anything, this outrage results only from a sudden collective focus into a particular event and a particular person: Janet Lim-Napoles. It is interesting to study the constructs of this event. However did it come to be that quite suddenly we should all be looking at a single person and read from her the whole narrative of corruption in our country?

Last week, the talk in social media had to do with Napoles’ properties abroad. What she bought her daughter for a birthday gift, all evidence of a profligate lifestyle hidden from sight until now. These stories drew various reactions, chief among them being that we are not a poor country at all, given how so much riches have been milked or “porked” from no other source but the country’s coffers.

Yet, this narrative tells only of the tip of the great big iceberg. For quite expectedly, what has been accounted for so far cannot be the whole amount. And if all these riches are now allegedly in the hands of one, Janet Lim- Napoles, how much would be in the hands of the politicians who endorsed these monies to her in the first place? The mind cannot help but do the inevitable arithmetic.

And of course these figures must be placed against the appropriate figures to describe the national poverty, the indexes of starvation, the lack of facilities devoted to educating especially the poor, figures to describe a summation of the waning of our collective hope.

The narrative does not end here. Our politicians have cited unprecedented economic growth. Which assertions only encourage us to reassess some more our own personal situations, to see whether indeed we are better off. Can we feel it?

Many of us still struggle to put food on the table. We struggle with medical bills, money for sending our kids to school. We contemplate how schools and universities all over the country seem to be doing so well while we ourselves have to borrow money to pay for our kids’ tuitions. And of course the final countenance moves us to feel not just a small amount of passion. Indeed, all these put us teetering on the edge of a seething anger.

Thus, when news broke out on the pork barrel scam, it did not take too much to make us feel the outrage we now feel. Judging by the news, this was an outrage directed certainly at Janet Lim-Napoles. But not just her. There were also the senators immediately linked to the scam. But more than them, there is also the fear that perhaps most of our political leaders might possibly be just as guilty. Or why have they been so loudly silent all these weeks? In which case, we might say the outrage really is for politics and politicians in general, with no one exempted. Not even the President if he does not do his job or go by his promise of “daang matuwid” especially where prosecuting this issue is concerned. The only question now is how long this outrage will last and what will it achieve for us in the end?

To be sure, this event should be pivotal in our country’s history. It had been the old dream to have a type of politics here that was devoid of corruption and the corrupting influences of money. What if we had public leaders who truly deserved their offices? What if we could now change the rules of the political game? Finally, to clean it up and level the field, so to speak.

If good fortune is on our side, this particular event and how we keep our collective focus into it might be precisely the thing we need to get us there.