Since Duterte became President, consistently undoing democracy, constantly violating people’s rights, just generally trampling on all our freedoms, and swinging the pendulum to the extreme of no accountability and no transparency, layered with flagrant lies and utter incompetence, I’ve held out for Generation X.

This is not some blind, baseless assessment of what it is my generation can do. Instead, it comes from a very keen sense of where we’ve come from, what is at stake for us, and the kind of future we still want. So many of us after all have families of our own, children who will grow up in this nation we all love to hate but love regardless, and one would like to think that there are enough of us who cannot imagine leaving.

Pinning my hopes on middle class Generation X is also based on recent history. At another time when we were fighting for freedom, a civil society of private citizens, the Church, schools, businesses rose in this country and worked together towards taking back democracy. They built a civil disobedience campaign that paralyzed businesses run by the dictator’s cronies, they boycotted San Miguel Beer and Magnolia Ice Cream, pulled out their cash from crony banks, stopped shopping in Rustan’s.

We are the generation born to parents and grandparents who made this happen. And we are this generation that might have been in a great crisis of apathy in the mid-90’s, but—I’d like to think—was really about getting our head together about nation. What is wrong with it, given the status quo it keeps, and the possibilities for re-imagining the ways of circumventing it.

But then the pandemic happened.

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