TARPAULIN

             Ooops, sorry for the title. I think I’m making this like an MMK story and this is not one.

 I’ve been on a travel the past days. Every Sunday afternoon I go back to Lucban, Quezon for academic purposes and every Friday I go home—in Magdalena, Laguna. This is my routine. And from Laguna to Quezon or Quezon to Laguna, on either way (via Pagsanjan or Majayay), one thing is common. It’s not the air, the sceneries nor the climate. It’s the big print of pictures on the road. It’s the Christmas and New Year’s greetings of those smiling people making themselves familiar in the public eye. It’s those programs they endorse whether it’s a free check up program or some sort of announcement. I don’t sound irritated…am I? I don’t know but those campaign materials or what they call “tarpaulin” somehow, were pissing me off.

Well I don’t have problems with those persons nor their greetings. Thanks to their thoughtfulness by their very warm greetings, warm because the election is coming soon. S what’s my complaint here? Well their names and initials—initials which emphasizes the position they’ll run for—are so much bigger than their greetings. Their names’ font sizes are much larger than the event they are endorsing. Their smiles showing their very clean teeth or their cutest eyes are the same, male and female candidates. Their faces almost covered half of the wall-sized tarpaulins along the way. By the way, it helps. Yeah, it helps the people remember those faces and names which are surely rich. Well, they can afford to have their tarpaulins and what-so-ever post in numbers in a town, a district, a province, a region, anywhere else in the country.

What’s making me sad is that they didn’t realize the real thing. What if the money used for making those large print-outs is given to the people in need? What if, though not in good intentions, they help people around them—the street children, the beggars…families which strive so hard to earn a living, to eat at least once a day. What if they try to win people’s hearts by showing generosity? Those people, with faces being popularized along the road, wish to enter the government…for what? To take back all the money they have used in campaign? To earn fame? Or to serve people? They wish to be included in a government of the people, by the people and for the people yet we, the people, can now see who deserves to be elected. We, the people should be observant and view the real motives behind a person’s doings. We, the people, should focus on the long term goals not on those smiling-faces, money-wasting persons who always promise to serve. Well, to serve their own goods.

I am not actually on a movement or anti-politician movement. This is just me, expressing my inner notions and ideas to the world I live in. it’s a free country after all. Maybe, I am just too excited or too eager to vote—a right for my rights. Seriously, I don’t know why I am writing these things but one thing I know is that these matters make sense. ^_^