AFTER the Pag-ila 2025 for Cagayan de Oro’s city councilors candidates last Saturday, I wanted to celebrate its success by indulging in sweet goodies which was my SOP — standard operating procedure — before I went on a low-carb diet in February 2022.
But then I immediately began to imagine the side effects: left-knee pain, rhinitis, headaches, bloated ankles and tummy, allergies.
How about a low-carb sweet goodie? But I wanted to stay carnivore. So, I thought of ordering a red-meat item at a resto. But restos usually use vegetable oil which is highly inflammatory. I ended up going home for my dinner of kutob and eggs, both fried in lard.
I now look at menus with wary eyes. Pork barbecue, for example, may look harmless since it sounds as simple as making tusok-tusok slices of pork and grilling them. Its ingredients, however, can be as complicated as a lab experiment, complete with scientific terms that I can’t pronounce.
Carnivore means only beef, pork, chicken, fish, eggs, and other animal-based food. And just add salt, beef tallow, lard, butter, water. Cooking made simple.
If only politics can be that simple, too, then the election in Pinas won’t have a dangerous campaign season, vote-buying and vote-selling will stop, and the Pinoy will finally learn how to vote wisely.
And there’s the wisea** Pinoy asking, Who’s Wisely?
Some Pinoy politicians and political candidates are kind of normalizing vote-buying and vote-selling through this advice: Dawat kwarta, botar konsensiya. So, expect this year’s Election Day to have more of the usual.
If a candidate is already saying, Dawat kwarta, botar konsensya, there’s no hope for him to ever support an effective voter’s education program in Pinas. He will simply rely on buying votes as the SOP, with the hope that the highest bidder will win.
Cagayan de Oro’s barangay election in 2023 had one particular barangay-captain candidate giving as much as P6,000 per potential voter — allegedly, supposedly, reportedly. Some feeling-lucky recipients happily shared their manna-from-heaven on social media.
But looking for witnesses who were willing to file cases against the vote-buyers was as difficult as looking for a needle in a haystack. They had already spent the money to pay off five-six loans, to buy basic necessities, or to splurge on the non-basic flat screen TV.
The P6,000 did inspire the Cagayanon’s wish to transfer to that barangay, perhaps hoping for the bribe to level up in the mid-term election this year and most especially in the presidential election in 2028.
And he and other potential voters did transfer to that barangay, prompting an investigation into the questionable increase in its total number of registered voters.
Vote-buying and vote-selling are like the chicken-or-egg story: which came first? Eggs have been my “rice” since I began my low-carb journey in February 2022. But answering that question can boggle even the carnivore dieter.
Still, let’s try to analyze which came first: the vote-buyer or the vote-seller. There’s no vote-buyer if there’s no vote-seller, and there’s no vote-seller if there’s no vote-buyer. Much like there’s no chicken if there’s no egg, and there’s no egg if there’s no chicken. Hmmm. I’m better off eating the chicken and the egg.
