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

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
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