Election day is payday: Use your chance

When you see politicians in the Philippines threaten and fight each other, you know who you have to pity—the people of the country. All these speeches, which were not of very high quality, reminded me of a speech given by Cuba’s Minister of Industry Che Guevara to the United Nations in 1964. Our professor showed us 23 great speeches in history, and this one stuck in my mind.

“There is only one thing greater than the love of freedom: hatred of the person who takes it away from you. Let’s be realistic, let’s try the impossible. To do something you have to love it very much. To love something very much you have to believe in it to the point of madness.” He ended his speech with “Patria o muerte (fatherland or death).”

How would one or another Filipino politician end his speech? With ”fatherland or dynasty,” ”fatherland or money,” or ”fatherland or power?” It’s meant satirically, but isn’t there a grain of truth in every irony? The people have to suffer from inflation, hunger, lack of education, and disease. We don’t need to wait for an invasion, we are destroying ourselves from within. Instead of fighting each other, money should not be invested in corruption, but in modern military equipment, police, universities, especially in science, research, and progress. Future generations will be grateful to us for this.

Climate change affects us all. My pen pal, Princeton professor of Mathematics and Nobel Prize winner in Economics John Forbes Nash Jr., who died in 2015, wrote to me: “We cannot change this world until individuals change.” Correct, I can add to that that science is about things not people, whereas politics is primarily about people and not things, and a person is not a thing.

Every person deserves respect, equal treatment and the right to be heard. We cannot abolish politics, but we can vote out politicians. Bertolt Brecht is said to have coined the quote ”When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty” in reference to the seizure of power by Adolf Hitler and his NSDAP. What was valid then is still valid today. Election day is payday. Use your ballot as a lesson to learn from, use it as a punch and do it legally and non-violently, use your chance! Vote! As Barack Obama’s slogan once said: CHANGE, YES WE CAN!