i Report Issue No. 3 2005 - Philippine Center for Investigative ...

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FOCUS ON FILIPINO YOUTH DEFYING THEIR ELDERS. Today’s youth confound their parents because they enjoy more freedom and are so at home with technology. Finding Spaces T KATRINA STUART SANTIAGO Tthe TOO OFTEN Filipino and cellphones, but unable to Tyouth is viewed with the con- communicate well without a Tventional eyes of our elders: keypad or a clicking mouse. Twe are the future of the nation, Our relationships are charac- Twe are the agents of change. terized by, even built on, text The government counts on messages and electronic mail, Tus to help save the country, impersonal as these may be. Tcivil society exhorts us to be We conspire with piracy and Tvigilant, the media remind us free Internet downloads with Toften enough that we are the gleefully open eyes, morality Thope of the nation. For the and ethics aside. We sit before Tmost part, however, they are our computers to find our- Tdisappointed. Especially when selves, if not in writing, then in Tit’s convenient, we remain in- creating websites, or in looking Tcomprehensible to our elders, for jobs, friends, a community Tand it’s easy to see why. we might belong to. For many We are the high-tech generation, adept at computers best friends, personal of us, our computers are our exten- 32 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT
T H E L O S T G E N E R A T I O N tion have brought us the call centers where half our youth are employed, changing their biological clocks, messing up relationships, and creating demand for 24-hour McDonalds and Jollibees in the strangest street corners. A small percentage of the other half are selfemployed, given rich parents who are only too happy to put up seed money and get their kids started on the capitalist course. Others with moneyed parents have the luxury of doing volunteer and NGO work, moved as they seem by a need to “give something back to the country” without necessarily seeing the big picture in which rich (probably their) families are the oppressors. Many are still part of the Philippine Left, confusing as that label has become, in all its denominations. At least those of us who are part of the different leftist movements have a better sense of what ails this country, even when we have to go from simple terms like poverty and corruption to the abstract levels and jargon of imperialism, busions where our work, our studies, our lives are conducted—if not created and re-created—as frequently as we find the need for it, which is quite often. Our dependence on computers and cellphones is not only an indication of our aptitude for high-tech tasks and processes, it’s also an indication of our need for something we can hold on to, something that somehow defines us, and only us. We love being incomprehensible to our elders because of this technology, and we revel in it. Unfortunately, a lot of the time we also reveal our incapability at discernment, as we unthinkingly forward ill-informed text messages or emails, upload pictures on the Internet without realizing the probability of its distribution, take stolen videos with our phones and think nothing of it. We have a hard time deciding whether something is right or wrong, dangerous or not; worse, we are unable to discern just what role technology is playing in our lives, or why it has become so important to us. This lack of clarity about the things that define us may be the only thing that we of this generation have in common. Born in the late 1970s to early 80s to possibly activist or hippie parents, or to the straight conservative ones who stayed aloof of either extreme, ours is a generation that can’t seem to find a reason for its existence. At least our activist parents had the Left to believe in and the Marcos regime to struggle against; our hippie parents had the liberation of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll to live up; our conservative parents had the Church and the institution of family to hold on to. By comparison, we are faced with nothing but the dregs of these institutions, now all unstable, often unintelligible, usually in the process of compromise. It’s practically a nonspace of resistance and liberation, with uncertain enemies and even less certain ideologies to back us up. Not that all of us are having a difficult time finding the right spaces within which we may exist, if only to survive. Cheap labor and globaliza- AT A LOSS. For all their worldliness, young people are not clear about where they want to go and the sort of future they should aspire for. reaucrat capitalism, and fascism. But so many more of the youth have left, or are set to leave. Our prospective teachers, doctors, nurses are on a constant exodus to different parts of the world, with a small middle to upper class percentage leaving in disgust what they think is a sinking boat. The bigger chunk of those who say goodbye though are of the lower classes, and they’re the ones who say that they shall return, when they’ve ensured their futures with the dollars they will earn. BUT MOST, if not all of us, are at a loss. It’s not clear why we’re living our lives the way we do, doing the things that occupy us. There’s always a sense of uncertainty, not about the future, but about the present: What exactly are we doing? Why is this what we do? Whereas the generation before us always had a sense of a future—with family, with career, with house and lot and what-have-you—we are always looking at a future that’s closer to the present, where we may finish our studies, find a job, write a book, or just simply see the month’s end and decide then what’s next. This is not to say that we aren’t enjoying ourselves, uncertainties and all. Thanks to the fruits of our hippie and activist parents’ labors, we live at a time when there’s freedom in the music we hear, the books we read, the television shows and movies we watch. We are liberated from the strict rules of the Church and the institutions of family, school, and employment. Freed from the stereotypes our parents rebelled against, we think nothing of reconfiguring our roles to suit our needs. We are redefining relationships as often as we redefine ourselves—literally with vanity, or figuratively with spiritual or religious beliefs, and the next hip ideology. Homosexuality in all its dimensions has become our norm. Easily accessible organic herbs, designer drugs, and expensive alcohol are inanimate friends we can count on. And then there’s the sexual freedom we are heir to, which most of the time we abuse, misuse, and unthinkingly tie our lives around. Our liberation, handed down as it was, has become the freedom we can’t quite live up to. We wear what we want, we can be what we want, and do as we please. But that doesn’t mean we’re actually doing something. For the most part, we are easily satisfied with ourselves, and that’s where the problem lies. We can do volunteer work for an NGO by day and party with abandon by night without feeling conflicted—we deserve it, we think, because we’re doing something for the country. We can sit at a café all day and talk about what ails our lives, our relationships, our country, and think that this is productive. We go to a token rally “for the truth to come out” and imagine ourselves socially relevant. We look at EDSA 2 and think: hah! that was my doing, without a sense of what it has truly brought this country, which isn’t much. FOUR YEARS ago, tasked to teach critical thinking and the essay to college sophomores eight to 10 years my junior, I PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT 33
Page 1: i REPORT July-September 2005 P75 Ph
Page 4 and 5: SHEILA S. CORONEL NO TWO presidents
Page 6 and 7: Tobacco, the country’s biggest ci
Page 8 and 9: THE TWO FACES OF GMA. Aides say tha
Page 10 and 11: likewise rebutted Zuce’s charges.
Page 12: T H E C A M P A I G N Presidential
Page 15 and 16: C A M P A I G N F U N D S Buying vo
Page 17 and 18: C A M P A I G N F U N D S On March
Page 19 and 20: T H E V I C E P R E S I D E N T WHO
Page 22 and 23: HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN? In 1998,
Page 24 and 25: legislators have given themselves p
Page 26 and 27: LIGHTS, CAMERA, IMPEACHMENT! ALECKS
Page 28 and 29: For Visayans, the center does not h
Page 30 and 31: The Moro people can be part of a pl
Page 32 and 33: TWO AT EDSA ‘When the wheels of h
Page 36: T H E L O S T G E N E R A T I O N d
Page 39 and 40: T H E L O S T G E N E R A T I O N K
Page 41 and 42: T H E L O S T G E N E R A T I O N s
Page 43 and 44: T H E L O S T G E N E R A T I O N d
Page 45 and 46: Stay, serve poor first, Stay, serve
Page 47 and 48: T H E L O S T G E N E R A T I O N l
Page 49 and 50: T H E L O S T G E N E R A T I O N W
Page 51 and 52: T H E L O S T G E N E R A T I O N m
Page 53 and 54: T H E L O S T G E N E R A T I O N a
Page 55 and 56: le Up le lim CHANGING FACE. Muslim
Page 58 and 59: FOCUS ON FILIPINO YOUTH ALECKS P. P
Page 60: T H E L O S T G E N E R A T I O N a
Page 64: GRASSROOTS GAME Jueteng has deep ro

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