The Spy in the Sandwich

Sunday, May 18, 2025

9:00 AM | Voting Through the Fog

I almost didn’t vote last Monday.

In past elections, I was always the early bird. I liked the quiet buzz of my polling station in the early morning, and the feeling of being ahead of the day. I liked ticking off that civic duty before the sun was too high and the heat became too punishing. I liked having breakfast after, a rasher of bacon in one hand while the other would go for an Instagram post—my forefinger proudly dyed in indelible ink, as if to say: Look, I did my part. I care about this country.

But this time was different.

I stayed in bed longer than usual, the sunlight already spilling through the curtains when I opened my eyes. My alarm buzzed with election reminders—both automated and internal. Vote! my calendar said. But I didn’t feel like voting.

Maybe it was the slow accumulation of disappointments in our political life—a fatigue that makes the ritual of election day feel like theatre. A part of me said: What good will it do? Another part whispered: What time do the precincts close again? My indecision was unfamiliar and uncomfortable, but not surprising.

In the days leading up to the election, I had barely paid attention to the Senate race, for example. I had vague inclinations toward Bam Aquino and Kiko Pangilinan—but I hadn’t done my usual deep dive, hadn’t cross-referenced with utmost diligence everyone’s platforms, hadn’t weighed track records. That lack of preparation unsettled me only somewhat. It felt like I was no longer engaged, like I had become one of them: the indifferent, the disengaged.

By noontime, something shifted.

I remembered an essay I had written weeks earlier—a piece lamenting the low voter turnout in the U.S. presidential elections and how progressive voices, by choosing to sit out, inadvertently allowed the current terrors of Trump 2.0. I had been somewhat scathing in that essay, angry at the apathy that tipped the scales toward authoritarianism. How could I write those words and then not vote in my own country?

Hypocrisy has a bitter taste. I couldn’t stomach it. So I got up, dressed up, and walked to my precinct at Amador Dagudag Elementary School in Lo-oc. It was a smooth process, surprisingly so. No long lines. No chaos. Just a few minutes, and then I was done. My finger inked once again — a ghost of the pride I used to feel. And yet, later that day, a heaviness lingered.

I scrolled through social media, I chatted with some friends, and what I saw and heard was disheartening. So many people I knew—people who had once raged and rallied, who had posted black tiles and protest slogans—were nowhere near a ballot box this year. Some were on the beach, some in another province, some unapologetically absent from the civic process they once championed. I had to ask myself: Have we lost faith in our democracy?

It’s hard not to think so. So many of us are tired. We’ve watched the same families recycle power like heirlooms. We’ve seen entertainers and athletes coast into public office on the wings of name recall, while competent but obscure candidates are drowned out. We’ve seen votes bought in brown envelopes, corruption normalized, accountability reduced to punchlines. It’s no wonder people are checking out.

But then, when the results started trickling in, there were some surprises. The biggest of them all, in the final analysis, is the impact of the youth vote. It was the glimmer of something new, maybe even something hopeful. Generation Z, along with younger Millennials, were apparently the surprise force this election cycle. Many of them, perhaps disillusioned by the outcomes of the last one , were now of age—and angry enough to act beyond their social media posts. And they did not follow the usual script at all.

They rejected the usual suspects. They shunned celebrity. They looked past the surface gloss and chose, instead, to scrutinize. They weren’t afraid to bring down dynasties. They used TikTok and Twitter not just for trends but for truth-telling. They mobilized in a way even the polling firms did not see coming. So maybe there’s something to be said about how youth—unjaded, unburdened by too many betrayals — can afford to believe again, unlike me. Or maybe they just know somehow that if they didn’t act now, they would inherit the mess we’re leaving behind. Either way, they voted. In numbers that mattered.

I don’t exactly know if the same new trends hold true for Dumaguete or Negros Oriental. The pockets of hope in our archipelago are uneven. Some places pulse with civic engagement; others slump in political inertia. But I do want to believe that something is stirring beneath the surface—something we can nurture, if we still have the will.

I must once again remind myself that if we lose faith completely, if we all decide the election is not worth the trouble, then we do give the game away. Voting in a democracy, for all its flaws, still remains one of the few levers of power left to the ordinary citizen. Yes, it is imperfect. Yes, it often feels futile. But I needed to know again that to abandon this ideal altogether is to surrender to cynicism. And the thing about cynicism is that it pretends to be wisdom. It says: I’ve seen too much to care. It feels mature. But in reality, it’s just a mask for despair.

I almost didn’t vote last Monday. But I did.

Not because I was hopeful. Not because I was excited. But because I knew that giving in to apathy—even for a day—was giving in to the very forces that benefit from our silence. I voted because I didn’t want to be a hypocrite. Because I still believe in accountability, even if it’s just the quiet, almost invisible kind. The kind that doesn’t go viral, the kind that doesn’t make you feel good immediately, but slowly adds up in the ledger of your conscience.

Maybe that’s what voting is now: not as an act of grand optimism, but perhaps of stubborn belief. A belief that the future is still being written, and that we—flawed, tired, angry as we may be—still have a hand in the ink.

Labels: elections, life, politics