Tag Archives: rally

Qwertyman No. 164: The Great Pinoy Flash Mob

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Qwertyman for Monday, September 22, 2025

AT THE Manila International Book Fair last week, a young man approached me to have his copy of my new book Windows on Writing signed, and took the opportunity to ask if there was hope for this country, as many of his fellow millennials didn’t seem to think so.

I kept my smile on, but was deeply saddened by the question. I wasn’t surprised by it, because you hear it every day, everywhere, from Pinoys young and old alike. The dramatic and sickening revelations involving massive corruption in our infrastructure programs only seem to have reinforced that sense of despair over our future.

One regular reader who must be about my age also wrote me to ask, “Where is the outrage of the youth over the corruption scandals now plaguing the country? Why are they not marching in the streets like you did at Mendiola and EDSA?”

Before responding to him—and this column is that response—I had to ask myself, is that so? Indeed I get a lot of memes about corruption in my Facebook and Viber feeds, but these come from people either my age or with the same liberal-centrist disposition. Beyond these, apart from predictable pickets by the militant Left, I haven’t come across the kind of sustained, youth-driven rebellion that challenged if not toppled repressive regimes in Hong Kong, Korea, the Arab world, and now Nepal, among other places. 

But can young Filipinos be ignorant of or indifferent to what’s going on? My gut tells me no, that surely the billions of flood control funds diverted to acquiring luxury cars, California mansions, and buxom bedmates must appall and anger the young as much as us Boomers, who grew up turning lights off and eating our plates clean. After all, it’s their future that’s being stolen from right under their noses. They have much more reason to protest today than we did in 1971, when we teenagers triggered what became the Diliman Commune over a 10-centavo-per-liter increase in the price of gas.

I’m guessing that placard-bearing street marches have fallen out of fashion with the young, except again for the radical few. Today young people wear their pain on their sleeves, and also broadcast it online. Even for political causes, it’s much easier and safer to mount a virtual demonstration, through reposts and likes, with perhaps greater effect. The crooks get named and shamed, the battle lines get drawn, and demands and expectations get laid down, all at the press of a button. And after all, wasn’t this what grizzled First Quarter Stormers like me have been asking for all these years—that the art and science of protest move past the tired clichés of red flags and raised fists?

But then I’m writing this before the September 21 protest rallies—that would have been yesterday—where, despite everything I’ve just said, I expect a huge turnout of young Filipinos, provoked beyond patience and cynicism by the revolting disclosures of massive corruption among their elders. This corruption saga—and we’re watching  just the beginning of it—could yet be the most unifying factor for Filipinos in our modern history, even more than tokhang, the West Philippine Sea, Manny Pacquiao, and Jollibee spaghetti.

For once—and maybe just this once—it doesn’t matter if you voted for BBM, Leni, Digong, or PNoy, or if you support Gaza, Charlie Kirk, same-sex marriage, or transgender bans, or if you listen to Frank Sinatra, the Eraserheads, Yoyoy Villame, or Bini. We all got screwed by the system, which is not saying that systems are neutral (they’re crafted after all by politicians and their ethics or lack thereof), but that corruption on this scale effectively achieves a democracy of the abused. It’s that Great Pinoy Flash Mob, if you will, that went out to the rallies yesterday—perhaps not entirely cohesive or coherent, taking baby steps out of factionalism into a nascent nationhood, welded by the consuming heat of their fury and indignation.

We can’t tell for now what will become of this reconstituted parliament of the streets—if it will hold together and clarify around the most basic and most urgent of its concerns, or if, as some predict and even hope, it will weaken and dissipate over arguments about objectives and tactics and a fundamental mistrust of the fellow on your left and right. We certainly don’t lack for skeptics, pessimists, and cynics who tend to see any and every move by the hero-figures in this play as futile, as it’s all been scripted and the rich and powerful will always win.

If there’s one thing that we liberals and leftists are especially good at, it’s handwringing and doomsaying to the point of paralysis, because we like to believe that we’ve scoped out the territory, researched the history, studied all the characters, plotted out all their possible moves and motives, and found a hundred smart ways to say “This won’t work.”

That “independent commission”? Not independent enough, poor choice of chairman and adviser, beholden to this and that. Forget it. That Luneta rally? DDS-infiltrated, with violence possible. PBBM? Wasn’t he the original nepo baby, and his family the topmost plunderers of them all? Shouldn’t we just have another go at a bloody revolution to take all the bastards out?

When you think about it, on a certain level, all that could be true. And then again, one can be very smugly correct and yet totally unhelpful. When people want to express their anger and see some action, you respect that emotion—or risk irrelevance, as the Left was at EDSA (which arguably and ironically the Left had laid much of the groundwork for, but then ignored as a rightist coup). For me, let that albeit imperfect ICI get to work; the “I told you so’s” can follow later; this drama needs to be played out, if the real villains are to be revealed.

The flash mobbers who went to the Luneta and EDSA yesterday weren’t being foolish; even in their rage, they held out hope, and especially for the young, their very presence was the hope, a cry for justice echoing across the generations. 

We can’t say what will happen next, but something good might yet come out of all this woefulness and despair, if we don’t listen too closely to our inner analyst. Instead of shunning the DDS, for example, I think this corruption crisis is a good opportunity to find common cause with them and even bring some of them over. The catastrophic flooding in Davao despite the billions given to the Dutertes in flood control money should be an eye-opener for their supporters—just as it should be a reminder to us that the DDS are Filipinos, too, with legitimate rights and grievances. 

If this trillion-peso corruption crisis helps us realize the substance and spirit of our nationhood, then it will have served a positive if costly purpose.

Hindsight No. 24: All Content and Settings

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Hindsight for June 27, 2022

CHARLIE COULDN’T tell exactly what the phone was until he slid it out of its case and, even then, its other specifications—model and memory size, which would determine its price—could be known only once he turned the phone on and made it work. The problem, of course, was that it was locked with a passcode, and if you didn’t know your way around, it was easy to turn next month’s rent into a brick. 

There were other, more elaborate ways that involved cables, computers, and words like “jailbreaking,” “DFU mode,” and “GPP,” but they were Nick’s specialty, for which he had a stall in Greenhills. Charlie was smart enough to know what he was good at, which was thievery, and to stick to it. Had he gone past second year in Koronadal, he might have become a Nick, or even better, a Mr. Garcia, who bought whatever Charlie could sell with cold cash and then disposed of them online through aliases like “Triciababy” or “Sweet Loreen.” 

Charlie had spotted a Samsung Galaxy Note on FB Marketplace that was being sold by Triciababy with the story that she needed a kidney transplant, and he knew that it was one of his pickups because it had a tiny chip on the top right of its screen. Mr. Garcia had paid him 3K for it and was now posting it for 8.5, which seemed unfair but then he didn’t even know how to describe the phone, let alone make up a story. He scanned FB Marketplace to get some idea of what to ask Mr. Garcia for, but it always came down to what the man was willing to pay, because he could come up with reasons like “obsolete” and “digitizer,” which simply meant that Charlie could have chosen better if he wanted to get enough to buy a new bike with. It was easier to steal a bike than to get something past Mr. Garcia, which probably wasn’t even his real name. 

He could have told Mr. Garcia to try it himself to find out how difficult it was to pick a specific model—on most days. You had to be in the right place, with the right kind of people, to score something high-end, like an iPhone 13 or a Galaxy S21. You didn’t find those in the malls and markets Charlie felt comfortable in, in the shirt and sneakers that made him look like a college student waiting for a date or shopping for jeans on sale, especially when he carried a book or two. 

But the Kakampink rallies changed all that. It was a pickpocket’s dream—tens of thousands of people massed on the street, all wearing pink, which meant that all he had to do was invest in a pink T-shirt to lose himself in the crowd, going along with the chants and finger signs. Many of these people looked and even smelled like they had stepped out of a shower. Charlie didn’t pay much attention to the simpler folk who could have been his uncles or cousins, seeking out the clusters of privilege.

Charlie already knew who held which phone, and where they put them away when their hands were otherwise occupied. He had spotted the woman and her iPhone at least fifteen minutes before he moved in; her phone had rung and she tried to take the call but put it back in her shoulder bag when the noise made all talk impossible. Thirtyish and plain-looking, she didn’t seem particularly rich, but with the pink T-shirts you never knew.

It was during the candidate’s speech that everyone seemed most distracted. People cheered and raised their arms. Charlie had no interest in what they were all excited or angry about—like “martial law,” when terrible things supposedly happened, well before his time: killings, torture, rape, like some war movie, of which he had seen and enjoyed a few. None of that had anything to do with him. And if it was so bad, why did they keep coming back to it? 

It took Charlie no more than a few seconds to swipe the phone and to vanish into the monochromatic crowd. The woman never felt a thing. Charlie gave her a backward glance and saw that she looked ecstatic, swaying with both hands in the air, her eyes shut as if in prayer.

Back in his room in Paco, he turned the phone on—last among the four he had taken that day. A picture of the woman and a small girl filled the screen, typical wallpaper for people her age. It asked for a passcode. He had ten tries before it locked up for good, but Nick could take care of that, so just for fun he tried 1-2-3-4. It opened. People could be so simple. It was an XS, 64GB, a four-year-old model he could sell for, oh, 7 or 8K.

Instinctively he went for the photos. There was always something interesting to be found there, sometimes embarrassing secrets the owners would have been happy to pay for, so Charlie thought he was doing them a favor by wiping their phones clean and erasing the past. There didn’t seem to be too many pictures on this woman’s phone. One of her with a man, posing in front of a fountain, obviously shot from an old photograph. Many shots of a baby girl, the girl and mother, girl, girl, girl, mother in a bank teller’s uniform, girl in fairy costume. Here and there, office excursions, Hong Kong, Taal, Baguio. Third birthday party, then suddenly, girl in hospital bed, closeup of girl sleeping, closeup of girl’s hand, then a flower arrangement beside the girl’s framed picture. And then the girl with eyes closed, a dozen of them from different angles, because the light kept bouncing off the glass. He remembered the mother at the rally with her eyes devoutly shut; they looked alike. 

Charlie had lost his father when he was a boy and his mother was back in Koronadal grinding corn. He had not seen her in five years, but now and then he sent her pictures of himself through a cousin’s phone, posing in shades before a new car and on the Dolomite Beach. At least she knew he was alive.

He knew enough to wipe the phone; Mr. Garcia wanted them clean and usable, and doing it himself instead of Nick would save him money. But when his finger hovered over “Erase All Content and Settings,” he paused, and wished the passcode had been something other than 1-2-3-4.