i have no generation, show me my motivation

the title of this post comes from the great Switchfoot song "Ammunition". this is a reaction to the growing hatemongering directed towards the manila elitist crowd in pinoy blogosphere.

first of all, let me agree to the universally accepted notion that my generation's motivation seems to be vanity. i have written about this before, and i do not retract it:

we are absolutely in love with ourselves. we have learned to equate great looking clothes to a successful career; fair skin to a happy love life; toned body to healthy living. our older siblings' generation had their depression, our parents' had their free love, our lolos' had their revolutions, we have our looks. and by george, do we look good. go to any mall and stare at us in our pamporma attire and tell me i'm lying.

(note that i am in no way encouraging vanity. but i will stand by my generation's motivation. i will not feel sorry for it as i do not expect the 90s generation to feel sorry for its depression, heck alternative music was born that way. the 80s had its yuppies who taught as a thing or two about financial security. the 70s had its hippies who shamed the world of its penchant for wars.)

for so many times our government has failed us. our leaders have become hopeless. my generation has never been really inspired. in school, teachers ask us, "What makes you proud to be Filipinos?", and we scratch our heads thinking of a bluff that could perhaps merit a good grade for recitation. many of us think the church is a joke.

devoid of inspiration, we look at ourselves. we began to make each other our own muses.

that said, i am not shocked to hear about my generation acting like complete fools, prancing around bars, burning money like nothing, all for our quixotic quest for ultimate hotness. i do have problem, however, when people start saying that we are only about that:

Over at Embassy, where Imelda’s grandson promotes Monday nights and the lady herself recently appeared for a twirl across the tiles, [Tim] Yap said consciences were not bothered by the yawning gap between rich and poor in the city.

“There is this mind-set, which I think is so passe, that says: ‘The country is in shambles and the country is having a hard time and you are out there partying.’ But this generation is guiltless when it comes to that.”

REUTERS

i'm sorry Mr. Yap, but you are dead wrong. we in this generation might fall all over ourselves trying to act and look hot, but if there is anything we have not lost, it is our conscience.

in order to see this conscience of which i speak, you need not drive far away from Embassy. near the edge of makati, you will find Washington -- a well-known nook of apartments upon apartments of bed spacers. all very affordable. this is where most of your generation sleep at night after long hours of partying.

you see, when the music stops playing, and the makeup is washed off, we go back to what really matters: we party to de-stress from work; work is employment; employment earns us money; money is what we spend for -- who else -- our families. most of our hard-earned money goes to our siblings' education, our lola's medication, our parent's needs.

think of the thousands of filipino nurses who go abroad. we go on and on about the nurses helping the country's economy -- the new heroes of the nation. this is the fact: they are leaving the country not because they care for our nation, they do that because they care for their families! that's a different story altogether, although no less heroic.

this generation has gotten tired of people power. we have stopped believing that a change in governance will feed the poor of the nation, solve graft and corruption and make the Philippines a First World Country!

we have disillusioned ourselves from thinking we can change the whole system. instead, we have focused our attention to the immediate, to the closest possible group of people we can help -- our families. and we do it by working our assess off. early morning shift, graveyard, overtime, overnight, weekend work, work from home, on-call duty. heck, we'll take them all! you want consciousness?! guilt?! ask the young people who work for you, Mr. Yap. chances are, some of them are sending kids to school.

so now let me post a picture of my generation. Reuters should talk to these people, not to Tim Yap.