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Featured Stories

OVERVIEW
Anak ng Jueteng
by Sheila S. Coronel
Like Joseph Estrada, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has been accused of accepting money from illegal gambling.

THE CAMPAIGN
Jekyll-and-Hyde Campaign
by Yvonne T. Chua
Alongside the official Arroyo campaign was a parallel structure that operated secretly and with little accountability.

Presidential Makeover
by Ellen Tordesillas
A foreign PR firm is re-engineering Mrs. Arroyo’s image.

CAMPAIGN FUNDS
Running on Taxpayers’ Money
by Luz Rimban
Billions of pesos in government funds were used to pump prime Arroyo’s candidacy.

THE VICE PRESIDENT
The Man Who Would be President
by Luz Rimban
Noli de Castro has come a long way from his days as a broadcaster; he may even end up in Malacañang.

CHARTER CHANGE
SOS: System Under Stress
by Sheila S. Coronel
Can Congress be trusted to hold a credible impeachment trial and to change the constitution?

IMPEACHMENT
Lights, Camera, Impeachment!
by Alecks P. Pabico
The impeachment proceedings should be the best show in town, but so far, it’s been a sleeper.

VOICES FROM THE PERIPHERY
For Visayans, The Center Does Not Hold
by Resil Mojares

The Moro People Can Be a Part of a Plural Society Without Losing Their Identity
by Omar Solitario Ali

The Time for Federalism is Now
by Rey Magno Teves

TWO AT EDSA
"When the Wheels of History Turn, You Hardly Expect the World to Turn Upside Down”
by Ed Lingao

“I Was at Edsa Out of Pure Disgust”
by Mylene Lising

FOCUS ON FILIPINO YOUTH: THE LOST GENERATION
Finding Spaces
by Katrina Stuart Santiago
They are the hi-tech generation, at ease with technology but otherwise lost when it comes to dealing with the complexities of a globalized world.

So Young and So Trapo
by Avigail Olarte
The Sangguniang Kabataan, training ground of future leaders, has fallen into the grip of traditional politics.

Teen and Tipsy
by Vinia Datinguinoo
More and more adolescent girls are drinking alcohol.

Perils of Generation Sex
by Cheryl Chan
Filipino women are having sex earlier, but are seldom aware of the risks, including sexually transmitted diseases.

The Business of Beauty
by Cheryl Chan
Shampoos, skin whiteners, and assorted other beauty products find a ready market among young women.

Machos in the Mirror
by Dean Francis Alfar
Filipino men are spending millions to look—and feel—good.

Male and Vain
Photos by Jose Enrique Soriano
Men are lining up to get facials, foot scrubs, and even dips in bathtubs filled with rose petals.

Growing Up Female and Muslim
by Samira Gutoc
Moro women still value religion and tradition, but are also responding to the challenges of modernity.

They are the hi-tech generation, at ease with technology but otherwise lost when it comes to dealing with the complexities of a globalized world.

by KATRINA STUART SANTIAGO

	DEFYING THEIR ELDERS. Today's youth confound their parents because they enjoy more freedom and are so at home with technology. [photos by Sonny Yabao]

TOO OFTEN the Filipino youth is viewed with the conventional eyes of our elders: we are the future of the nation, we are the agents of change. The government counts on us to help save the country, civil society exhorts us to be vigilant, the media remind us often enough that we are the hope of the nation. For the most part, however, they are disappointed. Especially when it's convenient, we remain incomprehensible to our elders, and it's easy to see why.

We are the high-tech generation, adept at computers and cellphones, but unable to communicate well without a keypad or a clicking mouse. Our relationships are characterized by, even built on, text messages and electronic mail, impersonal as these may be. We conspire with piracy and free Internet downloads with gleefully open eyes, morality and ethics aside. We sit before our computers to find ourselves, if not in writing, then in creating websites, or in looking for jobs, friends, a community we might belong to. For many of us, our computers are our best friends, personal extensions where our work, our studies, our lives are conducted — if not created and re-created — as frequently as we find the need for it, which is quite often.

Our dependence on computers and cellphones is not only an indication of our aptitude for high-tech tasks and processes, it's also an indication of our need for something we can hold on to, something that somehow defines us, and only us. We love being incomprehensible to our elders because of this technology, and we revel in it. Unfortunately, a lot of the time we also reveal our incapability at discernment, as we unthinkingly forward ill-informed text messages or emails, upload pictures on the Internet without realizing the probability of its distribution, take stolen videos with our phones and think nothing of it. We have a hard time deciding whether something is right or wrong, dangerous or not; worse, we are unable to discern just what role technology is playing in our lives, or why it has become so important to us.

This lack of clarity about the things that define us may be the only thing that we of this generation have in common. Born in the late 1970s to early 80s to possibly activist or hippie parents, or to the straight conservative ones who stayed aloof of either extreme, ours is a generation that can't seem to find a reason for its existence. At least our activist parents had the Left to believe in and the Marcos regime to struggle against; our hippie parents had the liberation of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll to live up; our conservative parents had the Church and the institution of family to hold on to. By comparison, we are faced with nothing but the dregs of these institutions, now all unstable, often unintelligible, usually in the process of compromise. It's practically a nonspace of resistance and liberation, with uncertain enemies and even less certain ideologies to back us up.

Not that all of us are having a difficult time finding the right spaces within which we may exist, if only to survive. Cheap labor and globalization have brought us the call centers where half our youth are employed, changing their biological clocks, messing up relationships, and creating demand for 24-hour McDonalds and Jollibees in the strangest street corners. A small percentage of the other half are selfemployed, given rich parents who are only too happy to put up seed money and get their kids started on the capitalist course. Others with moneyed parents have the luxury of doing volunteer and NGO work, moved as they seem by a need to "give something back to the country" without necessarily seeing the big picture in which rich (probably their) families are the oppressors. Many are still part of the Philippine Left, confusing as that label has become, in all its denominations. At least those of us who are part of the different leftist movements have a better sense of what ails this country, even when we have to go from simple terms like poverty and corruption to the abstract levels and jargon of imperialism, bureaucrat capitalism, and fascism.

But so many more of the youth have left, or are set to leave. Our prospective teachers, doctors, nurses are on a constant exodus to different parts of the world, with a small middle to upper class percentage leaving in disgust what they think is a sinking boat. The bigger chunk of those who say goodbye though are of the lower classes, and they're the ones who say that they shall return, when they've ensured their futures with the dollars they will earn.

BUT MOST, if not all of us, are at a loss. It's not clear why we're living our lives the way we do, doing the things that occupy us. There's always a sense of uncertainty, not about the future, but about the present: What exactly are we doing? Why is this what we do? Whereas the generation before us always had a sense of a future — with family, with career, with house and lot and what-have-you — we are always looking at a future that's closer to the present, where we may finish our studies, find a job, write a book, or just simply see the month's end and decide then what's next.

	AT A LOSS. For all their worldliness, young people are not clear about where they want to go and the sort of future they should aspire for.

This is not to say that we aren't enjoying ourselves, uncertainties and all. Thanks to the fruits of our hippie and activist parents' labors, we live at a time when there's freedom in the music we hear, the books we read, the television shows and movies we watch. We are liberated from the strict rules of the Church and the institutions of family, school, and employment. Freed from the stereotypes our parents rebelled against, we think nothing of reconfiguring our roles to suit our needs. We are redefining relationships as often as we redefine ourselves — literally with vanity, or figuratively with spiritual or religious beliefs, and the next hip ideology. Homosexuality in all its dimensions has become our norm. Easily accessible organic herbs, designer drugs, and expensive alcohol are inanimate friends we can count on. And then there's the sexual freedom we are heir to, which most of the time we abuse, misuse, and unthinkingly tie our lives around. Our liberation, handed down as it was, has become the freedom we can't quite live up to. We wear what we want, we can be what we want, and do as we please. But that doesn't mean we're actually doing something.

For the most part, we are easily satisfied with ourselves, and that's where the problem lies. We can do volunteer work for an NGO by day and party with abandon by night without feeling conflicted-we deserve it, we think, because we're doing something for the country. We can sit at a café all day and talk about what ails our lives, our relationships, our country, and think that this is productive. We go to a token rally "for the truth to come out" and imagine ourselves socially relevant. We look at EDSA 2 and think: hah! that was my doing, without a sense of what it has truly brought this country, which isn't much.