The guard smiled in welcome when he saw it was me on the front seat. He was about to wave us in. Then he suddenly turned agitated.

?You have a party-list sticker on your rear window. I?ll have to ask you to remove it before I let you in,? he apologetically explained, rushing up to driver?s window.

?Who said my car can?t be allowed in because of that sticker?? I bristled.

From the driver?s seat, hubby held my knee to hold me back. He knows when am about to go to war and it embarrasses him no end when I do so out there in public.

Liane, our 16-year-old, similarly gets painfully bothered when mama is about to turn fishwife. She frantically scrambled around in the backseat trying to move the offending sticker out of sight.

?No election paraphernalia allowed, ma?m. I?m sorry,? said the guard with a nervous smile. He was a bit more relaxed now that something was being done to resolve the hold up.

?Oh, okay. I thought you meant that party-list specifically,? I grinned back.

I picked up my phone and texted our host, ?Di daw puede pasok may ?- sticker ang car? Panic ang guard. We?re in.?

He texted back, ?XXX lang may permit to campaign here. Next time, write Do Not Vote ? on your sticker.?

Joke.

I don?t know why I got a little heated up back there.

I don?t even know why that sticker was there, or that it was there. It?s not my habit to stick labels on me and mine or anybody. I don?t wear my religion, politics, or my heart on my sleeve. I don?t even allow people to question any of the above. Those are intensely personal stuff, and none of anyone else?s business except mine. No Big Brother, no reality TV, no walking advertisements for me, pretty please. I don?t annoy you with my identity assertion. Don?t annoy me.

On second thought, I guess that was what it was about. The guard breached my territorial integrity with his judgment about my right to pass. Without even knowing how that sticker got there, I took on the identity it bestowed upon me. He judged my car, he judged me. He judged my car a no pass. I no likee.

But I do agree with the guard. Right about now, we all need a haven of calm from the collective psychosis of the electoral campaign. There are some places where people shouldn?t bring their personal baggage for display. There are places where you don?t bring the paraphernalia of one?s politics, religion or heart. The workplace is one of those. Thank heavens for places where people actually don?t want to be part of this lunacy.

The vector of contagion that brings the election fever is spreading. No workplace is spared. Unlike me, many employees out there believe it is their right to assault the people with whom they share workspace with the color of their political persuasions.

The personal is political. The political is personal. Whatever.

At 2:00 am most nights, the election fever just feels like a psychotic whirlwind threatening to blow us all down. I don?t know how much more of this we can stand, or when the whirlwind would have hopefully exhausted its lunatic fury. I suspect that when it does, we?ll all be too exhausted to get anything done. By the time we manage to rise to our unsteady knees, three years would have gone by and it would be time again to build up the frenzy of the next bacchanalia.

Election-related construction. Political jingles designed for the mind of an echolalic toddler. Debates that flout the laws of logic and breach all decent boundaries of good taste. Matters of the life and death of this nation reduced to trivial preference over airbrushed images and the ghosts of their fathers on campaign posters. Time defiled: Erap of sixty years ago, for example. Partylist sticker on my rear window. However did it get there? ?Gail Ilagan writes a column for MindaViews, the opinion section of MindaNews. Ilagan teaches Social Justice, Family Sociology, Theories of Socialization and Psychology at the Ateneo de Davao University where she is also the associate editor of Tambara.