Names

I WAS scrolling through my phone’s contact list, and I was surprised to find at least 12 names there that I don’t recognize. I absolutely have no idea how they got there and who those people are and how have they figured into my life.

There’s this name, Rommel Bolesa, for instance, that I can only guess must’ve been a driver from a car rental firm my old employer once hired for an out-of-town gig or a contact person in a provincial office somewhere.

I guess most of these unrecognizable names are like condoms or napkins: very valuable but are really “for one-time use” only. They were very important in a particular moment in my life, but are now essentially useless.

Yet, somehow, I can’t bring myself to delete them. There’s this nagging thought that one day, maybe by some cruel trick of fate, having these names in my cell phone will save me from some desperate, tragic situation on a boring, Sunday afternoon.

So they stay there, in my phone memory and SIM card, gathering dust, clogging my way to names I frequently use, incubating, waiting for that time when they will become useful again. That time may never come, yet they wait patiently, sitting there with a sinister presence, like a CC camera in a dark parking lot watching for a couple trying to steal some time away from their husbands or wives or trying to escape a drab existence that they desperately want to spice up with a steamy extra-marital affair.

Then there are names that somehow mysteriously vanished. They belong to people I know and who have shared important moments in my life, but I have not kept in touch for a long time: a high school classmate, a close friend now raising a family in America, an old flame.

When nostalgia or a desire to believe I am somebody important and have made something out of my pathetic life kicks in, I get this urge to call or send them a text message, but they’re not there. Gone. Unreachable. Missing and, well, missed. I must’ve deleted them (though I can’t remember for sure) or they must’ve been left behind in an old phone, abandoned, forgotten, left to rot forever.

I have since resorted to tagging names, so I’d know exactly who they represent and how they figure into my life.

I tag them with the institution or organization they represent. Officemates in my hole-in-the-wall office, for instance, are labeled “Chronicle” and then their name. So our quirky, abdominally challenged layout director, for instance, is “Chronicle Elmer A” in my phone, and all those people I came across my old job at San Miguel are “San Miguel John Does” and “San Miguel Jane Does.”

If we are really defined by the people we know – and don’t know – then I guess in a world that is increasingly becoming connected by cell signals, cables and invisible wires, anybody can really sum up a life by the names he or she has on their cell phones, and technology hasn’t changed much really.

Well, maybe now we get to know more people than we used to, before cell phones became as ubiquitous as the air we breathe. The quality of the relationships we keep, however, are very much the same.

There are people we keep for the rest of our lives, a few we’d rather forget, and then there are some we experience for just one brief, special moment, and we wonder where they are and whether we’d ever get to see them again. Then we reach for our phone and scroll down our contact list and we realize that, well, we are all essentially alone in the company of strangers.

Crumbs

IT is one of those big pre-election pitches that are as predictable as the sunrise but whose impact has been as vague and ambiguous as the boundaries that divide life and death.

On Sunday, the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines extolled in a pastoral letter its faithful flock to do whatever they can to prevent cheating and fraud in the mid-term elections this May, where 17,000 positions are up for grabs, including half the seats in the Senate and all seats in the House of Representatives.

The bishops stressed that “many of our current political problems, which have hindered fuller economic development and social justice, especially for the poor, can be traced to unresolved questions concerning the conduct of past elections.”

“As a nation,” they warned, “we cannot afford yet another controversial electoral exercise that further aggravates social distrust and hopelessness.”

The bishops riled over two cases in particular: the “Hello, Garci” scandal that marred the 2004 presidential elections and set off an impeachment case against President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo; and, the P728-million fertilizer fund scam

One archbishop suggests that the mid-term elections will serve as a referendum and provide closure to questions regarding Mrs. Arroyo’s leadership. If the President’s party wins, he argues, then she deserves to stay in office; if the opposition wins, then the people has rejected her.

We agree with the bishops that electoral fraud is a problem that needs to be taken cared of for our nation to really grow, not only economically and politically, but also spiritually.

The situation on the ground, however, isn’t as two-dimensional as the piece of paper a pastoral letter is written on or an archbishop’s simple logic.

Let’s face it. Cheating in this country pays, and it pays because it’s easy. It’s easy because when it comes to deciding what names to write on a ballot, the question ultimately is: What have you done for me lately?

Visit the Manila city council, and you’ll get a clearer picture of how politics is won and lost in this country. Councilors working the stands and the lounge – shaking hands, doling out loose change, approving requests for financial assistance – have a better chance of getting re-elected than those working the podium.

One alderman’s tactic has been to go around his district at night looking for a wake. He’s just following his instincts. He knows precisely that a P500 plucked from his own pocket and given to a grieving family will get him farther than any bombastic rhetoric about the cancer that is eating into the moral fiber of our society.

Crumbs rain down on the masses during an election year, and these crumbs often translate into votes.

Cheating feeds into the desperation that poverty breeds. When faced with a moral dilemma as to whether he should accept a P500 bill and vote a candidate he dislikes or walk away and vote according to his conscience, what do you think a jobless father of seven young children, one of whom is down with dengue in a local hospital, would do?

It’s easy to extol the masses with something like, “Let us regain our dignity.” But by God, be realistic. You can’t eat dignity. When the dilemma is between dying of hunger or selling out to get crumbs from an opportunistic politician, the choice is pretty obvious.

Are we being defeatists? No. We merely wish to point out that when we proselytize to the masses about doing the right thing, we have to make sure we fully grasp the gravity of the depravity and desperation they experience.