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.

Matters of survival
For many of us who could see Duterte governance for what it has always been—incompetent and palpak, corrupt and violent, propped up primarily by propaganda and tons of cash from cronies and most probably China, all-around the worst government we have experienced in recent years—the terrible pandemic response is almost no surprise.

Almost, because a part of us might actually have thought in the beginning that there is absolutely no way for them to get pandemic response wrong. After all, so much of this is common sense: a public health emergency response should be manned by the most credible experts, doctors, and scientists, based on the most recent science and international recommendations. It should know not to scare people more than necessary, but impress on them the urgency of the situation while providing them with the basics that they need—from masks to hygiene products, free testing with or without symptoms, and proper contact tracing, food and cash assistance for the vulnerable.

Pandemic response is not rocket science.

But here we are with a Duterte government that has had the worst pandemic response, and we all know by now that it isn’t that it can’t get it right. At this point, 16 months in, it actually looks like it refuses to do things right. And it’s gotten away with it because of a massive propaganda machinery in place that absolves Duterte of all blame; we have no way to track information and no one wants to bother given the predisposition towards hits and shares and mileage; and those of us who can see through all of this are just too preoccupied with trying to survive.

It’s all by-design. The worst pandemic response can get the people to rise up in anger and out on the streets. But it could also push people to refocus energies on what it is they can control: their own responses, their own rules, their own survival. We can also only handle so much.

Generation goals
One would like to think that the pandemic is the crisis point we need to realize that there is still so much to do, and that we need to be doing it now. Yes, we are exhausted, and yes it seems hopeless. And I am sure that there are enough of us thinking of futures that have nothing to do with here anymore—privilege allows us that.

But. I’d like to think that enough of us who grew up on post-EDSA romance, who know original Pilipino music as a patriotic thing, who lived through the shifts from landlines to cellphones, word processing to the internet to social media platforms, and all that this has meant for the intellect, criticality, and just … information—I’d like to think (hope) that we have the built-in headspace for nation at this point.

One would also like to think that we are not going to fall simply for the binaries that exist, because if there’s anything the 90s taught us, if there’s anything the ousting of Erap, the corrupt regime of GMA, the elite governance of PNoy taught us, nothing is ever as simple as the binaries. I think now that our apathy was precisely because of our distrust of the blacks and whites that post-EDSA propaganda taught us, and we sought a more complicated telling of its history, a more critical understanding of where it led us, without sacrificing what it meant.

Because it meant, as it does now, the capacity of a civil society—the adults of that generation—across various sectors from schools to business, the religious to the cultural sector—rising together with a common vision of what nation needs, and strategizing together towards actually getting it.

I’d like to think we all know what nation needs at this point, but also that accomplishing it will mean circumventing all these discourses that insist on black and white, good versus evil.

Gen X has reaped the benefits of democracy and freedom as reclaimed in 1986. We have built lives in this landscape, often questionable, necessarily wrought, always complex as it is. And we are heavily critical, as we have a clear sense of Martial Law and its violence, as we do of how it’s been undone, re-written, and re-booted in many ways across many governments. In the mid-90s, our crisis was apathy. In 2021, as the adults that have had to rise to the occasion of (extended) families and community, our crisis is the fact that we are as disgusted by this governance as we are exhausted by it.

2022 is the election when both disgust and exhaustion can be transformed into the movement we need towards insisting that we need to get our democracy back. And we are not talking about “ideals,” as we are simply insisting that we need to end Duterte’s reign, and that includes campaigning against his daughter, his cohorts, and his allies, from the national to the local posts.

We have 11 months to go. There is much we can still do. ***

If you’re interested, this is something we drafted in PAGASAph towards building Demokrasya, when we thought people had the headspace to think beyond binaries and discuss possibilities for uniting on one candidate—not necessarily who we want, but who will win this WITH US—in 2022. Demokrasya, as a dream, is still up here.