this story originally appeared in the philippine daily inquirer on April 15, 1999.
It has happened: I’ve become what I’ve always dreaded. It did not happen deliberately, or at least not willfully, but when the blinders go off, you abandon all idealism and start acting like your parents. Yes, your parents. They are the ones who started all this in the first place. Flower power was such a great idea, they should’ve kept at it with the intensity of an LSD trip.
But no, they had to don suits and have middle-class families with Kano tastes and Kano values. They had to lie quiet in their little mouse holes and make us study our bogus history while martial law and feudal politics stained the countryside with a mixture of random and almost ritual bloodletting. No, I am not angry with my parents for not taking a stand. I’m just sad that we have a culture of inaction. I am concerned it would develop into a plague. I’m afraid it could be genetic. I saw an acquaintance at a pizza joint a few days ago. He used to be active in the underground, I remembered. He even tried recruiting me once. Of course, having a brother in the Philippine Military Academy was a hundred million points against my acceptance into the fold. But I would hover over their tambayan every now and then just to hear them quote Marx–only to get it all wrong.
The following Monday, I would hear that they just came down from the mountains and that they ate with the farmers, and that one of them had become an outcast for refusing to eat with his hands. They were a mediocre bunch and they often lost their focus, but they did what few students dared to do. They willed to be more than the faux bourgeoisie their parents raised them to be. They were not content with being the young minority; they wanted to be the people. But unlike Kano movies, his story had little reason to end happily. I didn’t hear him at the pizza parlor quoting Chairman Mao. I saw him in a shirt one size too small, in a P100 tie, in a job that no one would have believed then he would be doing now. He was a waiter. And though in college he wanted so much to make a big difference as the proletariat, now he couldn’t even change my order from Coke to a Diet Coke for fear the manager, a pimply kid I could have whacked myself, would get angry. And this was a guy who defied a SWAT team once. Maybe he needed to raise money for the armed struggle?
His ex-girlfriend is luckier. At 23, she gets almost P30,000 a month working for a telecoms firm. She rubs elbows with balding tycoons and their sports car-driving sons, wears outfits straight out of ”Ally McBeal” and her hair is always in perfect aerodynamic lift (man, you should see it, it’s an art form). I look at her and have no doubt that she made the right choice, picking commerce over unorganized sedition. There are no traces left of the girl who used shout ”Imperyalismo ibagsak!” in front of the Congress although at that time, she and her perfect hair made insurrection seem so right, too.
Right now I have what a lot of other normal human beings want. No, not happiness. What Rainbow Brite-obsessing moron would want that? I mean I, at least, have a job. It pays a few pesos more than the minimum wage but at least it doesn’t involve taking my clothes off, although I sometimes wonder if what I do is really all that different. I am in advertising, a prostitute of prose who weaves words for things and principles I do not believe in. I have hired out my brain to the rich in a money-making compromise that has kept my stomach full but has sucked the idealism from my soul. I used to say to myself that I was only going to stay in this job for three months until my dream job comes along. But three months turned to six, then nine, and now it’s almost a year. Why have I held on for so long? It’s hardly because I’m beginning to like my job.
Every day I stare at my computer and contemplate seppuku. I’m forcing myself to like what I hate and for what? The money? I saw a fashion show recently and as I expected, beautiful, anorexic teenagers in small strips of fabric cavorted on that thing they call a catwalk. They were carefree, they were fun, they were beautiful. Essentially, they were nothing. Like wound-up dolls they walked, hugged, danced and occasionally went ”yah!” They would lift phones to their pierced ears and move their perfect lips, but nothing came out. Soon enough you realized they couldn’t do much else. Bored, I looked around me and realized I was in the middle of a tragedy. I was surrounded by their equally beautiful clones and I said to myself, ”Dear God, these kids are doomed.”
What is tragic is not that they have been predisposed to think a good profile would get them far in life or ”Dawson’s Creek” is the real world. What is tragic is that the world is fast becoming so. Armed with Seventeen in one hand and their parents’ credit cards in the other, these kids who have dubbed themselves Generation Y are bent on making the world a living fashion show. This new paradise is a place where money and beauty are god and the world is one big shopping mall with an escalator that leads to nowhere. Nice to know the ’80s is alive and well. That they discovered materialism early is the one consoling factor. They don’t have to waste their time searching for the meaning of life.
I know it’s such a pathetic thing to say, but look out your window and tell me it isn’t true. In college, I used to talk about ideals, how I would not sell out once I left the diploma factory because I believed one person with the heart for social change can be a catalyst for reform. I’m beginning to think even those ideals are a crock of bull. Every time the electric election circus is revived, I realize my visions of change are mere delusions. I heard a term for this affliction once: the dreamer’s disease. I think I know where we went wrong: We wanted to change the world in a big way. But there’s a problem with this kind of thinking. The world is big, so how do you change it in a small way? I don’t have a clue. I’m afraid I’m becoming my parents. They always said the day would come.
