The box

His late mother once ran for councilor of their old hometown. She ran for councilor on the prodding of those around her. To be sure, she was motivated only by such high ideals as a person might aspire for in the mid-1960s. Her own father had been an elected official of the provincial government in the commonwealth period. She ran under a political party her family was by tradition loyal to.

She thought she would not lose. She knew that vote-buying was the rule of the game. But she thought she did not need to buy votes. Most of the voters were, after all, her closest acquaintances and friends if not her neighbors. Judging by those who ran against her, she thought she had a good chance.

But when election day drew nearer she received a small wooden box or kaban with a cute little lock to secure it. The box came with a key. He watched over her shoulder when she finally stuck this key into the lock, turned it, and then lifted the lid. The box was filled with neatly stacked, crisp, unused two peso bills, each batch held together by a paper band as if it might have come straight from the bank.

It was the sight of this money which jarred his mother’s political resolve. If she had hoped to win heretofore, now she began to worry if she had not made a mistake by running at all. Though she looked down on a pile of crisp clean paper bills, it seemed as if she came to a final acceptance of the dirtiness of it all. She lost whatever false impression she might have held for Philippine politics. It did not take her long to decide what she would do. There was a bit of a discussion inside the family but at the end of the day, she chose not to buy votes.

She lost, of course. Not only did she lose. After the elections she returned the box, money intact, to the person who had given it to her, key and all. It would be the last time she would ever run. Any politics she would do from then on would have nothing to do with elections. Which was a sad thing. She would have made a good public official having been educated in the University of the Philippines in Manila with a degree in pharmacy. She was a good person who was always willing to help those around her especially if they were needy. Failing anything else, people came to her for advice. And she was known always to give a good one.

But after that election, people said she was politically ignorant. She should have, at the very least, distributed the money to her people telling them to vote for anyone they liked. By returning the money, she was really saying how dirty the money was. The act itself made whoever gave her the money lose face. That person could hardly be expected to repeat the act with her, all the more so since he himself lost. But thus ended her political career.

But even she herself realized such moral absolutism was not to be expected in this day and age. Such act would be considered now simple, even perhaps ignorant, naiveté. We are more pragmatic now. Otherwise, we have been so sufficiently desensitized, no money is ever for us dirty. People may be dirty. Never money. It follows after the same logic which goes; Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.

And yet, while those assertions may seem to make immediate sense, we only need to look around us to see where the logic has taken us and where it will take us still unless we dissuade ourselves. Where guns proliferate you will find more killings. But what of money, if it is neither dirty or clean? The pork barrel scandal shows to us just how far and how deep corruption has woven itself into the fabric of our lives. Consider the senators.

They do not look so evil. And they do not lie when they ask why they should be singled out. They know first hand and better than us exactly how far the corruption goes. They know it goes everywhere. Their claim to distinction is only that they were the ones who got caught. Or so they believe. For that would be their best excuse: It’s what everybody does!

He remembers looking over his late mother’s shoulder as she looked down into the box. He remembers being mesmerized by the sight of it. More money than they had ever seen in a single place. Even so, she closed the box, turned the key then shoved the box under her bed for the duration of the campaign. Things might have been different for her had she done otherwise. He is not sorry. There is only that sense of relief so profound it lasts even to this day.