AS I have said before, I feel obliged to exercise a degree of circumspection in sharing my opinion about the Philippines' candidates for president. It is not that I do not have opinions — I do, and rather strong ones at that — but I do not have the privilege of personally acting on them by voting. So, any attempt on my part to persuade others to favor one candidate or another unavoidably lacks an essential basis. In other words, one should be able to put his money (or his vote) where his mouth is; I cannot, so I must take care to stop myself short of suggesting for whom anyone else should vote.
But that does not prevent me from sounding the alarm about the potential consequences of certain candidates' being elected, particularly if those consequences have global implications. This may not be my country (despite having spent more or less a third of my life here), but it sure as hell is my planet, and I'll be damned if I sit idly by and watch as a candidate with a demonstrated record of environmental destruction vies for an office that will allow him to carry out harmful policies on a much larger scale.
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