Halalan 2022 – Katrina Stuart Santiago

Talking 2022 means talking about the elephant in the room that is Grace Poe.

It is clear to anyone who has a sense of how elections are won and lost, who has as starting point Duterte-Marcos’s massive propaganda machinery, who looks at surveys critically vis a vis one’s own political biases, that the only way to win this is to bring together the business sector, the middle classes, and the mass vote behind one candidate.

It was clear, since the 2019 Senatorial election results, that this would be Grace.

And no, you’re not talking to a Grace Poe fan. Search through this site and my social media accounts and you’ll see that I have had the worst opinions of her in terms of where she stands on oligarchs, at the same time that I have been impressed by how she takes the side of the transport sector and commuters in the Senate inquiries she’s led. This doesn’t make me two-faced. It makes HER a Senator, and it makes me a citizen who agrees as much as I might disagree with the people in power.

But that IS the thing isn’t it? The right to vote is tied to a sense of our responsibility to nation, not to the people we vote into positions of power. We are not their fans, or their followers; positions of power aren’t Facebook Pages or Twitter accounts. This is about citizenship and about having a sense of what nation needs at any given point, relative to the decisions that our leaders make for us, in our names, using our funds, regardless of whether we voted for them or not.

No one seems to see this anymore, and this is no surprise. Duterte propaganda has pushed even the most sane, most rational among us to turn to fanaticism and troll discourse, which is easy to fall prey to on social media, where people across Left to Liberal leanings have enjoyed deeper echo chambers. Yes, you will get leaders, from VP Leni to Makabayan talking about uniting the opposition, but none of that matters when their actors are first to engage in divisive, DDS-like behavior on public platforms.

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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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I started 2021 with such hope in the possibility of gathering together the politicized generations X, millennial, and Z towards affecting 2022 election outcomes. I sent out documents, talked to people, revised the documents, talked to even more people and groups, and kept that hope going. The vision, many agreed, was wonderful. We want to talk platforms not personalities; we want to champion the issues that we think are important for 2022, list the demands that we want candidates to talk about and take a stand on, if they want our vote.

I had hoped that if the Filipinos in their 40s, (Generation X, the Martial Law generation) and younger (millennials, gen Z) could organize themselves into the monolith that they are, proven as that is by the fact of our having risen to the occasion of the most vulnerable during the lockdowns last year, then all other generations (hey boomers!), and sectors (business sector, NGOs and CSOs, the Church, the schools) would have no choice but to listen, and join in.

I had thought that this was the perfect time, when so many of us in the middle have been politicized by the past pandemic year, and when it is clear that we have much to unite on not just among ourselves but especially and more importantly, with the masses. We have all suffered in this pandemic and under this governance. There is no reason to imagine we cannot unite on that.

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