I was still in my early high school years when I decided to consider taking Political Science just because the course would give you an immaterial and intangible prestige once you mention that it is what you’re taking up for your college degree. Whenever people inquire about my college details, I really feel an intense sense of superiority–I feel like I am on top of a pedestal while the others, of course, are on the floor looking up at me. Sounds arrogant and downright self-serving but oh well, that’s how I see things with these lenses that I wear.
Speaking of lenses, I am starting to wonder, what kind of lenses people nowadays use that all they see and say when they hear the word politics is–politics will always be equated to pejorative acts. Whether it be falsifying of public documents, bribery, forgery, plunder, invasion of privacy–name it and for sure, people will deliberately find a way to somehow associate politics with it. But I think, it’s not the lenses that we use that dictate out point of view of politics–I’m going to make a wild assumption that the manufacturers of the lenses are the ones resposible for these very derogatory and disturbing images that we have on politics.
There are several factors that influence our view of politics, and I dare say that these factors played a big part in shaping our political perspective. But I won’t really deal on these factors, instead, I’d rather deal with one specific factor that I find more powerful than the government itself–the media.
Everyday of our lives we are exposed to the different forms of media. Newspapers, televisions, radios, computers, cellular phones–all these are, in a way, mediums of information. I am not bothered by the fact that your little cellular phone can spread information in just minutes, what bothers me is the information these mediums give out and spread globally, defying continents and across oceans. I am bothered by the big possibility that journalists who took responsible journalism seminars and what not are being bribed just to curtail delicate information that is essential to the whole news story. I am bothered by the thought that journalists tend to exaggerate news just so that people will find them interesting, catchy, amusing and entertaining.
Politics is never meant to be a malign concept. I’d like to say and argue that it is a rather benign idea but I’m pretty much sure that out of the 92 million population of our country, almost 80 percent of them would stick to the notion that politics is such a bad thing, the remaining 20 percent divided between the apathetic and optimistic who still believes that politics is not a bad thing after all. And I dare say that the proportion of the apathetic ones is larger than those of the optimists. Sometimes, I am bound to blame the media for such preconceptions that people have about politics. I always thought that exposure, since this is what media’s all about, is a good thing but now, when you zoom things in a bit, exposure becomes a rather questionable deed capable of tilting our verdicts of politics to the opposite. Instead of clarifying, media makes things even vaguer.
I can’t be sorrier for the kids of the next generations, perhaps, the positive perspective of politics will only exist in their history and what would linger in their present is the negative, derogatory and pejorative political perspective. They will never get to see the ideal society that Artistotle dreams of. Though there is no such thing as the ideal, but since approximation is attainable, approximations are good enough to keep the spirits of achieving the perfect society up. I’m not saying that politics is clean–it may be and may be not. But I can’t stand the fact that, the way I see it, it’s the media that starts to govern the country and we are unconscious about it and not the leaders whom we voted for. Even just a tiny glimmer, I still see hope in our leaders.
