No one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins. Luke 5:37-38. And that is exactly the kind of change we are in desperate need of: a new Philippines without bartering, without bargaining, without selling ourselves short and especially, without old skins that will taint what comes in with good intention. A metanoia.
Yet, “no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for he says, ‘The old is better.” Luke 5:39. And that is exactly how we have resisted change throughout history. We prefer the old ways, our archive of what worked, statistics, tradition, and our past saga. We choose what we are accustomed to, the same old wine we drink, even when the ancient grape has scorched our throats, shriveled our skins, and withered the very vineyard that it grows on.
Our annals of history show us that it takes machinery and patronage to win the elections. Our old ways proclaim that you only vote for the “winnable” candidate lest you waste your vote. And so you rely on the past, choose the lesser evil among those adjudged “winnables.” Even when the traditional have scorched us dry, shriveled our institutions, and withered the very people that put them there.
Or, we keep changing the wine and yet pour it into the same tainted, decaying, moth-eaten vessel. Don’t you see? No matter how much new blood you put in, if the old system prevails, the new will burst the skins, all the goodness will run out and we’re back to the same old tainted, decaying, moth-eaten country.
But what if we truly allowed new wine to be poured into new skins? What if we stopped relying on a dead past but wrote our own history and created our own future? What if we stopped resisting the unfamiliar? Tried new wine for a change, onto an entirely new vessel? Forgot, just this once, a past that dictates that you only vote for the winnable candidate. Realize for the first time that your vote is never wasted and that you should never take yourself lightly historically. What if, you take your lone vote seriously, just this once, and as a start, gave someone almost unknown, this truly new candidate, with an entirely new politics, a genuinely new system, mindset and vision for the Philippines, a real chance to be that vessel? http://www.nicanorperlas.com Your vote does count. It carries weight and adds up to a future. Don’t waste it on a lesser evil. It is still evil, no matter how you call it. “No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins.”
The Girl and the Grail 