Balota, is a movie that is streaming this week and it is not a simple dish. It is a satire, critique and a clapback and a dunk on the faces of the movie’s audience.

During the 2007 elections, a former sexy star and a land-grabbing tycoon are in a tight race for mayor. Emmy, a strict yet popular teacher in a small town, is assigned to the Board of Election Inspectors for her local precinct. When violence erupts, she runs into the forest with a ballot box containing the last copy of the election results. Armed only with her resourcefulness, courage, and wit, she tries to outmaneuver the goons who want the elections to fail. Her loved ones and community are caught in the crossfire as she pays an increasingly steep price for defending the democratic process.

Teacher Emmy is played by Marian Rivera and the movie was not cheesy nor glamourous, it was downright ugly, real and as the PhilStar Headline said hitting the right spots. Written and Directed by Kip Obeanda, Balota rakes 135 million in the Box Office.

What can be seen in the movie that resonates big in us, the audience. It was to me a reminder that the people can get victory on a society that tramples decency and righteousness. That the corrupt can be held accountable and be put to jail. And that, it shoves away the notion that the good finishes last and the bad wins in the world of Philippine politics. The movie also showcases a teacher who is sure of her conviction and that when offered a big amount of money, the teacher can stand tall against the enticing offer and reveals a stronger and decent teacher that cannot be bought, that will never sell-out her principles, no matter what.

This maybe a sure fiction based on real stories but as a former Board of Election Inspectors in those times of 2007, I am aware of the hard work and travails of teachers who used that rusty ballot yellow boxes we call Balota.

From the get-go, we were shown that Balota brewed a concoction that would unravel a jolt to the usual political dynasty, vote buying realities of our electoral system, it reeks of gutter stink that the characters call as Baklang Kanal. The same description fits our elections, its gutter level stinky and gutter level dirty.

Teacher Emmy showed that we can resist and at times refuse the imburnal waters, we have been drinking for a long, long while.!

THAT gospel episode about Christ commanding Peter to “go to the deep and lower down your nets for a catch” (Lk 5,4) reminds us, among other things, that we should be bold and aggressive in our Christian life, stretching ourselves to the limits to do apostolate and actively cooperate in the continuing work of human redemption.

Peter at first told Christ that he tried to fish the whole night before and caught nothing. But because of his strong faith in Christ, he just obeyed what Christ told him, and lo and behold, he caught a big amount of fish. Fully astonished, he could not help but tell Christ to depart from him for, as he said, “I am sinful man.” That was when Christ told him to be a fisher of men.

We need to understand that our Christian life will always be involved in the continuing work of human redemption. It is in essence also an apostolic life, something that we have to be most aware of and for which we should be duly trained. The ideal to pursue is to be zealous in doing apostolate, always coming up with effective apostolic plans and strategies.

Christ’s intense desire for human redemption, expressed in his words, “I came to set fire to the world, and I wish it were already burning!” (Lk 12,49) should also be the desire of a true disciple of Christ.

This is something we have to be more conscious about, since right now I believe that many of us are buried under a heavy albeit deceivingly sweet yoke of spiritual lethargy. We take things easy in our spiritual and apostolic life. What would arouse us are mainly material and worldly things.

We need to react to this stranglehold of our spiritual and apostolic life, helping one another to be more spiritually alive, considering each one’s conditions and possibilities, giving good example and timely pieces of advice and suggestions, and leading the way in actively cooperating in this exhilarating divine adventure God is inviting us to join in this life.

Everyday, we should be seized by that urge to “carpe diem,” to kind of strike while the iron is hot. If we have faith, each day brings with it its own adventure orchestrated by God in his abiding providence, and we are invited to it since we are supposed to be co-agents with God in our life here.

To be sure, our life here on earth is never just an interplay of our plans and the other natural forces. God is very much in it, a fact that we have to be more aware of it and more importantly, better skilled in handling. We cannot go on unmindful of this fundamental truth.

We should not be afraid to enter and take most active part in this drama with God and others, because even if it involves everything and all sorts of trials and difficulties, it is always worth it. This is what our life is really all about. We avoid making a fiction of our life, deluded by its false images.

To top it all, if we have faith and trust in God, we know, in spite of passing contradictions, that what we get involved in is always something for the good of all of us in all aspects of our life, from the most personal to the most global.

Threats to the family are aplenty that we cannot and must not just rely on authorities for protection. Children of school-going age need parental care and protection more than what authorities can provide. We know too well that authorities could only provide limited supervision and protection to school children. School authorities can only oversee school children while in the confines of the school premises.

Beyond class hours and outside the school campus, we cannot expect school authorities to still be responsible for school children. It is the responsibility of parents to do their share in providing care and protection to their children after school. While there are police authorities providing school safety and protection, they too can only do so much of their task within the area of the school.

Reports regarding students being duped into vices and other undesirable activities by peers must be a cause for concern among parents. These problems are prevalent among high school students who are found in groups that engage in off-campus activities. These youthful students call their groups as fraternities and sororities. Observers however consider these groups as gangs for they do not have the characteristics of real fraternities and sororities. All that these groups do are nefarious activities like forcedly collecting money from hapless students who are threatened with harm by the gang.

In other instances, these groups engage in misguided activities. They do not have any clear purpose than enjoy the company of their gang doing what they want to do afar from the sight of their busy parents. Students of this generation seem lacking in parental guidance and influenced by misguided elements of society. We are aware how peer groups take primacy among the influential factors in the life of students. It poses to parents the great challenge of combating the evil forces that drag students to misguided activities. We cannot rely on others, not even authority figures, for the care, protection and guidance of our children.

But we must give attention to the factors that lead to the way students behave today. We may unconsciously be allowing our children to take misguided paths. A lot of media blitz from television programs require parental guidance but parents simply do not care providing children the needed guidance. In school, values education is part of the curriculum but matters like children’s rights and related topics on freedom and privacy sometimes go offhand, giving the students the wrong notion of independence and less respect for parental guidance.

In their eagerness to assert the rights being taught in school, students often go beyond the parameters by totally excluding parental guidance in the vocabulary. The indoctrination of wrong and misguided values by various sectors are the unwitting cause why students are falling into unwanted and undesirable activities. All these may still be traced to seeming lack if not the utter failure to guide their children and to perform their basic parental obligation.
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