In solidarity with today’s nationwide No to Con-Ass rallies and those who sympathize at the sidelines (myself among them, as my wound from surgery has yet to heal completely). Inspired by this and this. Follow the developments live on Twitter by searching for #conass and join the Stop Con-Ass Now! cause on Facebook.

I’d like to include this post I made in my campus forum. This is in response to a guy who called those opposed to Con-Ass “crybabies”, and another one who seemed to imply that since congressmen are elected officials, they have free rein to do what they want in office.

~o~o~o~

“the point about how they won is important. just the other day i spoke to our househelp who talked about the difficulty of voting in the province. it’s fashionable to round up people the night before the elections, do a headcount, and threaten them to vote for you. if the headcount doesn’t match the canvass tally, well, it’s not going to be pretty. that’s not even in maguindanao but in visayas.

being voted into office doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want. as representatives of the people, their votes should reflect people’s sentiments, not the other way around. if people don’t agree with what they do, then by all means they should be held accountable and explain themselves (voting by viva voce didn’t help).

even obama, who won by a landslide, still gets constant criticism from democrats. in return, he explains his policies to address their concerns and is known to adjust accordingly. i’ve heard him being derided as a flip-flopper, but then that’s what you get when you have a leader who actually listens.

only a third of congressmen submitted consultation reports to the Committee on Constitutional Amendments. what happened to the other two thirds? did they not ask their constituents what they felt about the issue? i’m not against charter change per se. revising the constitution is part of a country’s evolutionary process. however, i disagree with the current congress’ methods and distrust its leadership. trust, i think, is what it all boils down to. they don’t have any.

if the masses don’t move, they’re called apathetic. if they are vigilant, they’re called crybabies. all of you, us, are free to criticize each other, that’s fine. all of us are also free to dissent. personally, i’d rather be called a crybaby. a vigilant citizenry is critical for a democracy to work and keep politicians in check.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 12:19 pm and is filed under comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.