The Great Pinoy Flash Mob

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.

- JOSE DALISAY

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.