Lowering our standards

I NEARLY fell off my seat reading these comments from a couple of Filipinos living in the United States, which appeared last Friday in the Letters to the Editor section.

From Paul Cruz of San Francisco: “Are we going to burn down our whole house to kill a fly? If Ms Arroyo did cheat, so what? Are we going to get a million pesos because we were right? In the end, all we want is to live a decent life. All this political bickering will win us nothing -- just an unstable country with lost investments.”

From Lelis Arambulo of Anaheim who wrote in Tagalog, in effect saying: Truly the Philippines cannot hope to progress. The mentality is very divisive! I can’t read or hear anything good that President Arroyo has done. It’s all accusations that don’t get to be proven anyway. Why don’t you get united for once?

.......

As I said in a column last week, that is the new element, or nuance, that has crept into the pro-Arroyo argument today. The tack now is not to argue that Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo did not cheat in the election, it is in fact to grant it. But to minimize, or even trivialize, its significance. As Cruz puts it, so what? Cheating in elections is nothing to be strenuously exercised about, correcting it is in the order of killing a fly. You do not burn a house down to kill a fly.

Have we reached a point where we are now free to postulate that stealing the vote has become a minor inconvenience to us, the voters, protesting it angrily is just overreacting to a, well, “lapse in judgment”?

That's from de Quiros' latest article today.

Nakakalungkot.