This is a reaction to the letter of Col.

Leonardo Odoño, “Drastic reforms needed to

provide every Filipino a share of the national wealth” (12/4/20), where he stressed the
need to address the adverse impact of our oppressive and decaying social, economic,
and political orders that aggravate social inequalities and alienate Filipinos from their
government.
Ours is a democratic form of government, which is actually a system of representative
government that requires the people to trust those that they elect to make decisions for
the common good. While our electoral system may be rotten, it can stand
improvement as it is inconceivable to think of democracy without elections, which are
a necessary tool or methodology for converting the collective will of the people
through their elected leaders into government and policies, and the means to change
the government.
Nonetheless, we should regard elections only as a means of taking part in democracy
instead of seeing it as an end in itself. Otherwise, we are holding to a notion of
democracy that reduces its meaning simply to voting in elections, a ritual that boils
down to an individual action performed in the silence of the voting booth.
Without citizen participation in the form of organized demonstrations and formed
coalitions to push for government action or reforms on a number of issues, elections
alone are no guarantee of a stable political system that is responsive to the needs of its
citizens, especially so in an electoral system characterized by the merry ways of the
corrupt and the corrupted that go on and on in a vicious cycle.