It was blackest night. The only sound I could hear were my fingers pounding the keyboard, hard at work. There was swoosh from my instant messenger, like a lightsaber being lit and on the upper right hand corner of the screen, a sticky from growl was pasted. A friend happened to come online. It was Roch.

“Are you going to vote?” Roch asked. “TG Guingona. You should vote for him. ”

To be honest, Roch’s question, in my mind’s eye registered like this: Do you have the ability to overcome fear?

If you are reading Blackest Night, you would know this. The most powerful weapon in the universe is a ring that is a circle of never-ending light. Its color is the symbol of renewed life. When a ring-bearer, even the Torch Bearer falls, the ring asks a simple question when choosing a replacement: can this being overcome great fear? There is elation when that ring floats before you, offering its symbiosis: You have the ability to overcome great fear, welcome to the Green Lantern Corps.

May 2010 may be far away but there is much that can happen between now and then. Noynoy Aquino is faced with questions about his minority holding on Hacienda Luisita. None of the attack jobs focus on CARP and what exactly is wrong with it. A snippet about CARP from my post, this is the Opportunity of Solomon and the Luisita:

For more than twenty years, the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program has utterly failed not only to provide for an equitable distribution and ownership of land, it has failed to improve farmers’ lives and it has disastrously ruined the Philippines’ agricultural industry. How many landowners chose then to sell their land for housing and other commercial development rather than to sell to farmers? How many sugar mills then went out of business simply because of labor disputes that helped cause their closure as much as high operating cost brought about by an inefficient and rowdy labor force and global challenges? How many farmhands have been deceived by marxism to despise capitalism for the sake of despising it?

The more rowdy elements of society prefer to fester anger, to feint being victimized when clearly, they prefer to choose to work against the system in some perceived grievance than to engage society openly. How then is this zealot form of marxism any different from the terror Usama bin Laden inspires? How then is this heckling any different from highway robbery? How then is this methodology not a cause of the poverty that their ideology wishes to destroy? How then is this not festering hurt and anger?

Then there is the surprising entry of actor Edu Manzano into the Vice Presidential fray, under the administration’s party. Maybe on December 1st, Chiz, won’t confuse us and just drop off the race.

There is great trepidation at how successful automated elections will be. I am certain no one reading this hopes for it to fail— yet there are myriad challenges as @momblogger points out. Then there is the ongoing battle to open the source code for the program to be used on election day.

Of course, you have to know how to vote in an automated election. These questions do not dispel my doubt that it can be pulled off successfully.

My doubt come from that realm of knowing IT projects hardly ever work right the first time around. Certainly, rare it is for it to be successful, when one hardly has any experience in pulling off something like this in a mammoth scale.

Many of you might point out that we’ve tried automated elections in Mindanao. I’m still more comfortable rolling it on a smaller scale and then growing it in years rather than doing it in one mammoth swoop. It just seems more prudent that way, especially with a lot riding on May 2010. The law of course says the country must be automated in whole and not piecemeal. What a flawed law.

Don’t get me wrong, I hope election automation can be pulled off. I most certainly hope that there will not be a failure of elections on election day. I hope there will be a government on June 30, 2010 and that the transfer of power goes to the rightful victor of the fight.

What happens if it doesn’t?

Let me segue a bit to note the most important event of the week comes from US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s vist to Manila (transcript of ANC Live forum). You should check that out.

As I was writing, there is great trepidation. The die has been cast and seemingly for better or worst we are headed towards a rough road.

There are scary things out there like Microsoft patenting sudo.

More than a duty, I associate overcoming great fear and voting because there is a lot riding in the next election. It is a battle beyond good and evil. Maybe there won’t be a tingle in your arm as the green light flows out of the ring, limited only by what we can imagine. But marking that ballot with our choice is close enough I think. On that Monday in May, it is my humble opinion that we must set our fears aside, overcome it and vote for the future. It is a shot at redemption. It is a shot at opportunity. It becomes a new dawn, a new chapter. I hope that that ballot will indeed open new doors.

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*image is from here. It was published under creative commons.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Philippines License

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