The University Student Electoral Board (USEB) just released the results of the University Supreme Student Council (USSC) and College Supreme Student Council (CSSC) elections for the upcoming academic year 2023-2024. But I bet you haven’t checked the names of the winners yet, you just took a sigh and said “Well, of course, this person won,” as if it was predetermined.
I bet you didn’t even know that there was an election happening up until the Google forms showed up in your respective group chats which imposed a 50-peso fine to whoever won’t cast their vote. I bet you just voted based on what others have said, choosing between the lesser of two evils, or in this case, your own right to suffrage, so to speak, was just a mere sign of formality.
As someone who worked closely through this year’s election, I have to say I was quite disappointed— not because I had any electoral bet that lost, but because there was a permeating stench of disinterest that lingered throughout the studentry. To simply put it, most of us actually didn’t care about the student elections, but this is not surprising. We’ve pointed this out in a previous editorial and in an extra effort of trying to get the student’s involvement, we’ve also done our fair share of campaigning through a series of articles, interviews, and publication material posted in all of Amaranth’s official social media pages. But all these couldn’t save the lost cause that this year’s elections had become.
There is something much worse than choosing the lesser evil— indifference. It ultimately cultivates a culture of complicity and conformity. This is not how true democracy works, even for a university student government.
Being one of the top universities in the country, it's appalling to know that our democracy is wasted because of voter apathy. At around thousands, you would expect that at least 75% of the population would participate in this annual votation. With this rate, you would think that students would be fierce enough to protest for legislation, question the governing body, and scrutinize any political aspirant to the best of their ability— but as it turns out, that percentage seems to be phantastic. It's ironic to believe that our university leads numerous ranks and accolades when it comes to academic excellence but is not as engaged, or to say it bluntly, lazy to admit to the idea of leadership.
What makes this entire election period so unfulfilling is that only a few students had the courage to participate, and I’m using the word “courage” to loosely reference how vastly distant Viscans have been when it comes to selecting student leaders. We are nitpicky with credentials and qualifications for every candidate, but we do not go beyond our efforts to try and be educated with their platforms beyond paper. And when given the chance to do so, just like the Miting De Avance, only a few show up and use their 'voice' to ask questions. How can we fully assess these aspirants if we do not even care about whatever they want to say?
The search for good governance is too good to be true for a university whose students only want to reap its benefits but don’t want to get their hands dirty to earn it.
Some of us became a little too dependent with catchy sound bites and partisan issues that only drew us further away from the real purpose of the elections. It’s funny how we only collectively function when we want to spot that ‘specific timestamp’ during the Miting De Avance recorded video, or when we only swarm the comment section for the candidates’ stances on social issues. All these come after our political egos have been easily distracted by angst and uproar that shadows real issues that only last for a few days or so.
Winning this year's election also seemed like the anti-climactic prize to a game that everyone was sick and tired of repeatedly seeing that they just had to hand it to any of the competing parties, much less was a prompt to proceed with our monotonous student life. It also didn’t help that the elections were conducted online either. It made the selection process a matter of easy clicks of one-and-dones, which may have been foolishly filled in by voters who only knew the candidates by namesake and not by what they actually stand by.
Its so easy to demand accountability and spew complaints about student activities, organizational fees, and strict implementation of fines; but when solutions to these issues were being discussed, where were the students? We are so quick to blame the inefficiency of the USSC and the CSSC by not being pro-student or falling short with their duties, without being aware that we are also one to blame ourselves in the first place for not representing ourselves enough.Makapagreklamo na kulang sa gawa, pero wala din namang ginagawa. Some lessons are painful to learn but we must learn it anyway.
And it's unfair to fully blame the candidates for being repetitive with their causes, to say that it’s a been-there-done-that situation because no matter how excellent or indifferent you view them, at least they showed up and tried. The same cannot be said for voters like us who are detached to the idea of projecting and demanding what we want from them, so when the time comes and new officials are elected, we just have to suck it up and pay the price for our almost non-existent and careless act of so-called ‘democracy'.
There’s a future at stake here, and that is for every Viscan who is still in the university, and for those who will come after us. We cannot risk becoming oblivious and ignorant of our own responsibilities, because in the first place, if we really wanted to make our college lives much more tolerable, we could’ve done something about it already. If we desperately wanted to change the system, why didn’t we act towards it? If we truly had the power, why didn’t we exercise it? Afterall, it's not hard to make the right decision.
This year’s election was not meant to change the course of Viscan history. You see, for the system to work, we must work fair and square alongside it. In the future, let’s believe that elections are made not solely for the candidates nor for the people already in power, but for us, the studentry. A sense of camaraderie would be appreciated, since that's the primary thing we can work with to fully deserve good governance. If our apathy and skepticism keeps plaguing how our university will elect its leaders in the future, we could be facing our own faults at a drop of a hat. We can’t take that chance or else, it turns out to be the reason why we can’t have nice things.