HOTSPOT
Tonyo Cruz
Students don’t live in a vacuum, wherever they may be enrolled. They are citizens too. They witness or experience what other citizens witness and experience daily – inadequate mass transport, high prices of goods, official incompetence, and other outcomes of injustice, corruption, and treason. In particular, working students, or any students from workingclass families, know poverty quite intimately. They don’t need to be brainwashed or influenced into being awakened.
What sets them apart from their parents is that they have the time and opportunity to analyze the problems they are mired in. The youth is also a sector that’s by nature curious, questioning, allergic to or unafraid of official authority, combative against inequality, and always desiring a better country and a better world.
Ironically, the same educational system that seeks to reduce them into mere skilled and docile labor or even into the intelligentsia for the status quo is the same system that provides them the tools and opportunity for self-awareness and social commitment. History is thus witness to a long string of youth rebellions, youth activism, and youth-initiated revolutions not just in the Philippines but around the world.
It is thus surprising to the young ones — and the once young — to be told that their social commitment, or their being woke under Duterte, could only be a product of brainwashing and infiltration by the Communist Party of the Philippines, or even perhaps recruitment to the New People’s Army. Moreover, the trouble is that this military story line boomerangs on the government by exalting the CPP-NPA as a genuine foe of tyranny, and confirms the role of the revolutionary movement as a thought-leader capable of inspiring activism and revolutionary action in this day and age.
Students of the University of the Philippines and the Polytechnic University of the Philippines know their activists quite well. They are their own classmates and friends. They know their backgrounds, and even their families. The issues that activist student organizations arouse, organize, and mobilize for are their issues – rising cost of education and of living, the corrupt and incompetent handling of the pandemic, helping the workers and farmers, defending the Lumad and other indigenous peoples, providing relief to the neglected disaster victims, giving justice to those felled by extrajudicial killings like fellow youths Kian delos Santos, and, yes, fighting a tyranny that’s so corrupt, so vile and so traitorous.
The same could also be said of students of other colleges and universities falsely and malicious tagged as “recruitment ground” for the CPP-NPA. Again, one does not need to pass the UPCAT or PUPCET to see what the regime has been doing or has not been doing. One only needs to be an informed, thinking, and committed citizen, and have the time and opportunity to analyze the situation to arrive at certain conclusions and see a course of action.
The rented crowds of so-called parents and senior citizens rallying under pro-military banners have not only miserably failed to attract support from students, the youth, and their parents who are mostly workers and farmers. The so-called Duterte Youth and League of Parents of the Philippines symbolize the failure of the military and the government to produce a credible organization of youth in support of tyranny. The most that they could produce are the Cardemas, the couple whose “claim to fame” include having Bongbong Marcos principal wedding sponsor and Sara Duterte as wedding officiator, and being found ineligible or disqualified from representing the youth sector in Congress.
There are no face-to-face classes right now in UP, PUP, and all schools, colleges and universities nationwide. Thus it cannot be said that the problem is right inside the shuttered campuses. Or is the military targeting the Lumad kids whose “bakwit school” is hosted by UP? Are they after the books at the main libraries? Which books would be burned? Would there be evidence planted in tambayans and faculty offices?
As always, the youth of today are as inventive and creative as those who came before them. But they did not invent or create the school problems and social ills that they see widely reported or experience alongside their families in this time of pandemic. The youth did not cavort with Beijing. Neither did they botch the pandemic response. They did not steal P15-billion from Philhealth. They didn’t say wait for the COVID-19 vaccine. They did not call for emergency powers.
Every night, the youth dream of solving those problems. They talk among themselves, form or join organizations, search for sterling examples of leadership, and formulate solutions to problems they see and face. They advocate democracy, nationalism, fairness, justice, inclusion, and social action. They look up to thought-leaders from Jose Maria Sison to Leni Robredo to Pope Francis, and to the youth heroes of the old revolution and the anti-dictatorship resistance.
The problem of the military and the regime is that they are forcing the youth to side with them when the same military and the regime do not side with the youth. The generals are harboring the illusion that they are the influencers and thought-leaders the youth are waiting for. Who will tell them? Or should we bother?