Tag Archives: youth

Qwertyman No. 82: How Young Filipinos See Their Future

Posted on by
Reply

Qwertyman for Monday, February 26, 2024

THIS SEMESTER, I’m teaching an undergraduate class in UP called “Professional Writing,” a course I designed more than twenty years ago to help English and Creative Writing majors (and other seniors in search of interesting electives) get a handle on what the “real world” out there expects of them, in the kind of everyday jobs they’re likely to land. Not Shakespeare, not Jose Garcia Villa, not lyric poetry and neither the full-length play, but rather the more mundane assignments you get paid a salary for: business letters, press releases, feature articles, AVP scripts, brochures, and speeches. 

I find myself telling my students that, in a way, what I’ll be teaching them—which is basically how to conform to organizational or institutional standards and norms—is counter-intuitive to what’s been thought of as the UP way of asserting oneself and even questioning authority. This mythified UP “yabang” or “angas” could be one reason why UP graduates don’t rank at the top of employable prospects for corporations. 

So I feel like I have to teach my students the virtues of humility and sufferance, of sticking with a job and doing it well even if it’s not the coziest or smartest thing in the world to do, and of the importance of execution and delivery with no excuses, no (audible) complaints, on time, and against all odds. Before they break the rules, they should know the rules, so they’ll know exactly what they’re breaking and why (I bring up how Picasso was a realist before he turned to Cubism).

Of course, I also tell them that the door swings both ways—they can also walk out of a job they can no longer take (like I’ve done a few times in my own career), but not before thinking through the consequences and figuring out one’s options. Innovation and initiative are great to show on the job—but they can also backfire if not handled well, given people’s (and many managers’) ingrained resistance to change. In other words, prepare for and learn how to deal with adversity, which can be a better teacher than I’ll ever be.

It’s going to be an interesting semester, seeing how the students are responding to my provocations. One of those provocations was our first in-class writing exercise, which was a “visioning” of sorts, where I asked them to look 20 years ahead (preparatory to their next task, which is to write a job application letter). I’m sharing some of their responses below (excerpted here with their authors’ permission) to give readers an idea of how young Filipinos see themselves in their own future. There’s a palpable strain of pessimism in these responses—and that’s understandable, but it worries me. We shouldn’t saddle our successors with the notion that things can only get worse. So I’m making a note to myself: teach reality, teach adversity, but above all, teach hope. Having survived this long, despite everything we had to go through, should yield a useful lesson or two.

Student A: I remember telling myself upon entering college, “If I end up becoming one of those people I despise—a heartless doctor, a vain lawyer, all in the name of shameless success—I’d rather not enter UP.” Twenty years from now, the Philippines—and by extension, me included—will probably still be trying to heal from all the abuse that accumulated through time. In my dejection, I see the country still having a hard time distinguishing the morally right from wrong. Yet I hope that it would be otherwise. My hope sees differently from my rational musings, my hope sees the tide calming, a time I no longer have to convince my father of a reality so transparent it bites us in the face like a serpent.

Student B: I struggle to think of what the future holds for me. Truth be told, I struggle to think of a future with me in it at all. I find that thinking of the future brings with it a wave of dread, because even if the state of the country miraculously improves, there will always be a bigger power that inevitably ruins things for everyone else. However, if I somehow manage to be present still, (through either sheer luck or spite), I will likely be working at an office or a school somewhere. I’ll have a cat or two if the landlord allows it. Who knows if I’ll ever get married. The only thing I’m sure of is that I won’t have children—I can’t, in good conscience, bring someone else into this mess of a world.

This all sounds pessimistic, but in reality, I would actually call myself an optimist in day-to-day life. I want to think the best of people, and I believe that people are inherently kind. There is still a chance for things to improve, for everything to work out, but I can’t ignore the sinking feeling that it’ll only get worse from here. It might seem like we’ve already hit rock bottom, but somewhere, some world leader has brought a shovel and they’re ready to dig.

Student C: In many ways the country is a better place. People are more free to be who they are and love who they love, without fear. We have made leaps and bounds of progress in research and development. Science creates new technology, and we artists learn new ways to create, adapt, and keep toe-to-toe. Because I’ll be damned before I let the machines win. Yes, life is better. For those who can afford it. I want to afford it. But those braver than me fight for a future where everyone need not to. Because that’s the thing about human nature. Fighting is instinctual. Through war, poverty, and inequality, there will always be people fighting for something better. Many because they have no choice but to fight or die—fight to survive. Others because they owe it to someone, maybe themselves, to be the source of hope they want to see or have seen before. 

The country is far from perfect in 2044. Those selfish, like myself, have found a good life amidst a rotten core. We have survived. I have survived. Now it’s time to finally be brave. In 20 years, I know I’ve learned so much. Let me teach what I can. 

Hindsight No. 19: Plot and Character

Posted on by
7

Hindsight for Monday, May 23, 2022

(Photo from philtstar.com)

WITH THE counting all but over—setting aside some issues not likely to change the outcome—it’s clear that our people have spoken, and that, by a 2-to-1 majority, they have chosen Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to lead this country for the next six years. 

It’s no huge secret that I, among many others, voted for somebody else. Of course I’m unhappy, but what I feel doesn’t really matter much in the scheme of things. Given that the life expectancy of the Filipino male is 67.26 years, I’m already on borrowed time at 68 and would be lucky to see the end of this next administration, let alone the one after that. I’ve told my mom Emy—who voted at age 94 and who shed tears of dismay and disbelief when the results rolled in—that living for six more years to vote one more time should now be her goal. Just surviving will be her best revenge.

I wonder how it is, however, for the young people who took to the streets for Leni and Kiko, believing that they would make a difference. They did, although not in the way they expected, to ride a pink wave all the way to Malacañang. They realized, as we ourselves did ages ago, that money and machinery are always heavy favorites over hope and idealism, and that issues, ideas, and the truth itself can be made to look far less important than image and message, if you can buy the right PR consultant.

They will also have learned, as has been pointed out by other commentators from both sides, that it wasn’t all disinformation—that Marcos Jr. appealed to the genuine desperation of the poor with a promise of relief, however illusory. Since most of Leni’s young supporters were visibly middle-class, first-time voters, it was a rude but necessary awakening to the realities of class politics in this country, which politicians of all kinds—none of whom have to worry about where their next litson baka is coming from—have learned to negotiate and manipulate. 

Defeat, it’s been said, can offer more lessons than victory, and while we may have metaphorically won in some significant respects—chiefly the aggregation of “middle” forces not tied to any traditional political party into a burgeoning progressive movement—there will be much to review and refine in the years ahead. This very dissociation of the Kakampinks from the old parties and their command structures, for example, was a blast of fresh air for many volunteers, but also a liability for operators used to the old ways.

Understandably there’s been much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth in the trenches, in the desire to meld seething resistance with grudging acceptance. I see it in both young and old activists—the young, because they’re heartbroken for the first time, and the old, because they didn’t expect to find themselves facing a Marcos all over again. The bashing and taunting they’re getting online from galleries of screeching monkeys doesn’t help. 

Being one of those old fogeys, I tend to be more subdued in my reaction to Marcos Jr.’s victory, and advise my young friends to cool down, ignore the bashers, and steel themselves for a complicated and challenging future. As someone who went through and survived martial law—I was eighteen when I was arrested and imprisoned for alleged subversion (although I was never charged or tried in court, just locked up for the state’s peace of mind)—I can offer them living proof that we can survive dictators and despots, with faith, resourcefulness, and courage. My parents survived the Second World War, and many other people have gone through worse.

I’m neither predicting nor wishing that a Marcos presidency will be bound to fail. I’d hate for the country to suffer just to prove a point. Besides, whatever I think today won’t matter one bit to what will happen. Whatever Marcos does, he will do so of his own will, by his own nature, out of his own character. What that character really is will emerge in the crucible of crisis—and crisis is the only thing the future guarantees, whoever the president happens to be. Beyond and regardless of the propaganda for and against him, Mr. Marcos Jr. will have ample opportunity to display what he would not have us glimpse in a public debate, and that revelation will do more than a million tweets calling him a thief or praising his acumen.

Speaking of character, I had an interesting discussion last week with an old friend, a renowned professor of Business Administration, who brought up the possibility of “luck or destiny” to account for the Marcos victory. He added that luck was an important factor in business, and that he would flunk a student who thought otherwise. 

I disagreed; as a teacher of creative writing, I said that I wouldn’t accept “luck or destiny” as a resolution for a student story. We’d call it deus ex machina—a helping hand—which thwarts the logic of the narrative with an artificial and improbable ending. I know: it happens in real life, but not in good fiction. As Mark Twain says in one of my favorite quotations, “Of course fact is stranger than fiction. Fiction, after all, has to make sense.” 

Whether factual or fictional, stories are really less about events—the plot—than character. The plot is simply there to enable character development. Things happen for a reason: to test and reveal our character, to show ourselves and others what kind of people we really are, with dramatic clarity and inevitability.

If you’re wondering why I strayed from the May 9 election to a mini-lecture on writing, it’s because we can look at that election and its aftermath as a long and continuing narrative that will establish our character as citizens, and as leaders. The next crises—the post-pandemic economy, China’s ambitions, a crackdown on civil liberties, getting deeper in debt—will come to try us. That’s the plot. And when that happens, Bongbong will be Bongbong, and all Filipinos—31 million of them, especially—will see exactly what they bargained for.

So if you’re still smarting, just chill, recuperate, get back to something you enjoy doing, and let this drama take its course. Like my mom Emy, endure and survive. Give Marcos Jr. a chance to achieve his “destiny,” which could yet be everyone’s best education.

Hindsight 14: Weaponizing the Youth

Posted on by
6

Hindsight for Monday, April 18, 2022

ONE OF the most troubling episodes of the war now raging in Ukraine happened a couple of weeks ago not in Kyiv or the eastern region—where ghastly atrocities have taken place—but in Penza, a city in western Russia. A 55-year-old teacher named Irina Gen was arrested after a student reportedly taped her remarks criticizing the Russian invasion; the student’s parents got the tape, and turned it in to the authorities, who went after Ms. Gen. She now faces up to ten years in prison for violating the newly minted law against “spreading fake news” about Russia. Earlier, in the city of Korsakov, students also filmed their English teacher Marina Dubrova, 57, for denouncing the war; she was arrested, fined, and disciplined.

That the Russian state is punishing its critics is nothing new. It’s reprehensible, but you expect nothing less from the place and the party that invented the gulag, that frozen desert of concentration camps where millions suffered and died over decades of political strife and repression, mainly under Joseph Stalin. 

What I found particularly alarming was the role of students as informants, a virtual extension of the secret police that are the staple of repressive societies. This, too, is nothing new. Throughout modern history, despots have drawn on their nations’ youth to lend a semblance of energy and idealism to their authoritarianism, ensure a steady stream of cadres, and at worst, provide ample cannon fodder.

In Russia, the Komsomol rose up in 1918 to prepare people between 14 and 28 for membership in the Communist Party. Four years later, the Young Pioneers took in members between 9 and 14, and just to make sure no one who could walk and talk was left out, the Little Octobrists were organized in 1923 for the 7-9 crowd. 

The Hitler Youth was preceded and prepared for by youth organizations that formed around themes like religion and traditional politics, and it was easy to reorient them toward Nazism. An all-male organization matched by the League of German Girls, the Hitler Youth focused on sports, military training, and political indoctrination, but they soon had to go far beyond marching in the streets and smashing Jewish storefronts. Running short of men, the Germans set up a division composed of Hitler Youth members 17 years and under, the 12th SS-Panzer Division Hitlerjugend. It went into battle for the first time on D-Day in June 1944; after a month, it had lost 60 percent of its strength to death and injury.

Chairman Mao relied on China’s teenage cadres—the Red Guards—to unleash the Cultural Revolution in 1966 against the so-called “Four Olds” (old customs, culture, habits, and ideas, which came to be personified in elderly scholars and teachers who were beaten to death or sent off to prison camps for “re-education”). 

Under Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s martial law, the Kabataang Barangay was created by Presidential Decree 684 in 1975 to give the Filipino youth “a definite role and affording them ample opportunity to express their views.” That sounds innocuous enough, and indeed the KB would go on to engage in skills training, sports, sanitation, food production, crime prevention, and disaster relief, among other civic concerns, under the leadership of presidential daughter Imee. 

At the same time it was clearly designed to offset leftist youth organizations like the Kabataang Makabayan and the Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan by drawing on the same membership pool and diverting their energies elsewhere—more specifically, into becoming the bearers and defenders of the New Society’s notions. (Full disclosure: I was an SDK member, but my younger siblings were KB.)

I would never have thought that the “Duterte Youth” meant something else, but it does; evidently, it’s just shorthand for “Duty to Energize the Republic through the Enlightenment of the Youth Sectoral Party-list Organization.” Organized in 2016 to support the Davao mayor’s presidential campaign and later his policies as President, the Duterte Youth have affected quasi-military black uniforms and fist salutes. Its leader, Ronald Cardema, reportedly brushed off comparisons with the Hitler Youth by pointing out that the Germans had no patent on the “youth” name, which he was therefore free to use. (Uhmm… okay.)

Adjudged too old to represent the youth in Congress (his wife Ducielle took over his slot), Cardema was appointed to head the National Youth Commission instead, from which perch he then directed “all pro-government youth leaders of our country… to report to the National Youth Commission all government scholars who are known in your area as anti-government youth leaders allied with the leftist CPP-NPA-NDF.”

I acknowledge how Pollyannish it would be to expect young people and even children to be shielded from the harsh and often cruel realities of today’s world. The war in Ukraine, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the pandemic are just the latest iterations of conflicts and crises that have turned 12-year-old boys into executioners in Sierra Leone and child miners in Bolivia, Madagascar, and, yes, the Philippines. 

Their enlistment in political causes—of whatever orientation—is another form of maltreatment or abuse for which we have yet no name, but few governments or anti-government rebels will let them be. Their minds are soft and malleable, their fears obvious and manipulable, their rewards simple and cheap. With the right incentives and punishments, it can be easier to turn them into monsters or machines than to safeguard their innocence. They can be weaponized.

I’ve mentioned this in another column, but there’s a scene in the classic movie Cabaret, set in the Nazi period, where a handsome and bright-faced boy in a brown uniform begins to sing what seems to be an uplifting song about “the sun on the meadow.” But as it progresses we realize that it’s a fascist anthem which is picked up by ordinary folk with chilling alacrity. Watch this on Youtube (“Tomorrow Belongs to Me”) and then look at your son or nephew, or the children playing across the street. If you want, you could vote to have them marching and singing a similar tune in a couple of years.

(Photo from Rappler.com)