AMONG the biggest casualties of the bitterly fought 2016 presidential campaign are rationality and civility. The two commodities have been in short supply, ever since rival camps took to the internet, not only to support their candidates but to mock the competition.
On Facebook and other social media networks, there was simply very little evidence that the three official presidential debates encouraged intelligent debate among voters. Instead of a rational examination of all the candidates based on their character, track record and platforms of government, we saw memes that ridiculed them and angry exchanges of insults among supporters of opposing camps.
While all sides were guilty of wearing blinders that preclude open discussions, supporters of presidential candidate and Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte seemed particularly virulent and intolerant of any view but their own.
“Even if he sexually harasses all the women in the Philippines, curses the Pope again and again, kills even the innocent, rapes the dead, steals all the money from government coffers and pays taxes to the communist rebels, I’ll still be for Duterte because he stands for change,” one Duterte supporter said in Filipino in a Facebook exchange.
When a senator accused Duterte of stashing millions in a secret bank account in BPI, the mayor’s supporters threatened to pull their deposits from the bank on the farfetched assumption that bank officials would brave imprisonment by violating bank secrecy laws.
“Today, I and my husband are going to BPI to close our accounts,” one woman wrote. “The reason—loss of confidence and trust in BPI. If a senator… who is supposed to create laws can break them with impunity for the sake of destroying the reputation of a well-known bank depositor, like Rody Duterte, how can we, the ordinary people be assured that this will not be done to us?”
The woman then urged others to follow her lead, without entertaining even for a moment that the leaked bank information might have come from some other source, or that if the allegations were true, they would certainly cast doubts on her candidate’s honesty.
But perhaps the most glaring example of the loss of civility and rationality—and even common decency—was the online bullying that human rights advocate Renee Julienne Karunungan suffered at the hands of Duterte supporters who threatened her for a Facebook meme she created depicting the mayor as “a lazy choice.”
Karunungan has filed charges of grave threats against 14 of the cyberbullies, whose messages to her were truly disturbing.
“I hope you get raped, or get mugged,” one Duterte supporter told her. “That’s what you want, right? You don’t want change because you are against Duterte. I hope one of these days you get raped so you’ll come to your senses.”
Another said: “I have friends who want to kill you. You have the money anyway, save that for your hospital expenses.”
How did we get to this point? When did it become all right to insult, browbeat and threaten those who hold political views that are different from ours?
Have we become incapable of mature political discourse that is both rational and civil?
This question will haunt us long after the heat from the current campaign dissipates and the next president is chosen.
We can only hope that we can still step back from the edge where brownshirts and jackboots prevail over reason and conscience.