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Apathy
The past few Saturday mornings, I've been back in college—sort of. The director of ISO teaches a sociology course on social movements here at Ateneo de Manila University, and she recently asked me to guest lecture on the U.S. Environmental Movement. It wasn't something for which I felt particularly qualified, but I obliged nonetheless, and so started to attend the class and keep up with the reading.
It was familiar and comfortable to return to being a student, and exhilarating to attempt becoming a teacher. On the first Saturday I went to class here, not only did the general context feel familiar, but so did the class itself, its specific motivations and subtext. It was a social movements class, and rarely do we study social movements from a disinterested perspective. We care about them because they offer the possibility of dramatic, people-driven change, and we want to know what makes them succeed and what makes them fail. As the class talked about the moment of collective, mass action that defines a movement, the conversation seemed haunted by another eerily familiar question: today, why does such a moment of social change seem so impossibly far away?
This question echoed many of my best classes at Duke—classes on civil rights or human rights or the environment. It had even been the heart of my thesis, an exploration of a non-profit that was on a mission to fundamentally alter the role of corporations in society and ultimately change the meaning of democracy in America—a mission that I eventually came to see as doomed. In this class at Ateneo, a similar sentiment prevailed; the professor grappled with the lack of significant student activism, and the students, many of them activists, struggled to understand and justify their failure to produce the energy of other historical moments.
This whole exchange seemed ironic, as a brief glance at the Philippines—especially from my position—suggests anything but a stable, unagitated situation. For starters, the Philippines has a robust recent history of political protest and revolution. The hated Marcos regime fell to non-violent crowds of millions in the 1986 EDSA revolution, and as recently as 2001, a second “people-power” revolution ousted Joseph Estrada and put the current president, Gloria Arroyo, in place. This is a country that is still dealing with active armed insurgencies, both communist and Islamist. In the Philippines, revolution is not a dusty historical notion, but an ever-present possibility.
In the few months that I have been here, there have been two bombings in Manila, one in a major shopping mall, and the other in the congressional building. On the Friday between the classes I attended, there was an attempted coup against the Arroyo administration, which has been implicated in human rights abuses and one scandal after another. Even here at Ateneo, there was recently a religious mass and protest rallies with the Sumilao Farmers, a small indigenous group that has walked more than a thousand miles to Manila to protest the theft of their land. Those farmers have now been camping for a week in front of the Department of Agrarian Reform. By the looks of all this, the Philippines is turbulent and uneasy, poised to boil over in one way or another.
Yet here we are on a Saturday morning, bemoaning, of all things, apathy. It felt out of place and pedestrian, like we were trying to explain the low voter turnout of twentysomethings in U.S. primaries. It just didn't make sense to me. In this political climate, I would have expected argument or tension or hope or fear or anger—almost anything but apathy.
But apathy—or at least something like it—really does seem to be the norm. Considering the unrest that we tend to associate with words like “bombing” and “coup,” the mood here has simply not matched. When the first bomb went off in the Glorietta mall (it was later declared a gas leak, but no one seems to believe this), everyone at work stopped and huddled around the TV for a few minutes, sending and receiving text messages. But that quickly subsided, and there was no change of mood, little sense that anything particularly noteworthy had occurred. Security lines got a little longer for public transit and the malls, but the crowds felt unchanged in both volume and disposition. As Jimmy, a sociologist who works with ISO, noted, the response of most people was simply to go shopping. Glorietta 1 and 2 might have been bombed but at least Glorietta 3 and 4, the other half of the mall, were still open.
The congressional bombing a few weeks later seemed to produce even less of a ripple, though this one left no possibility that it was just a “gas leak.” The paper wrote headlines; people joked that there was enough “gas” in congress to cause an explosion, and worried that all of the hubbub might make traffic worse along Commonwealth Avenue.
The coup attempt—if that's what it can be rightfully called—drew a little more attention, perhaps only because it was unclear what exactly was happening. A senator on trial for an earlier coup attempt had walked out of court, accompanied, rather than restrained, by his guards. He and a few pre-arranged supporters paraded down the street to a five-star hotel where they began a standoff with the police. As my coworkers and I watched on TV, there was a glimmer of apprehension and excitement. This quickly shifted to a mixture of exasperation and disgust as it became clear that there was no real potential for the coup, and as the police went completely overboard, driving an armored personnel carrier through the gilded lobby, then tear-gassing and arresting not only coup participants, but the media as well, just for good measure.
Besides President Arroyo herself, no one seemed to actually fear the coup attempt. My officemates and the newspapers dismissed it as silly and disappointing, but understandable. It was too brief, too disorganized, too pointless to be noble, but that hardly seemed like a vote of confidence in the Arroyo administration. The strongest reaction seemed to be unsurprised anger at the government for using such excessive force. In the aftermath of the standoff, an overnight curfew was called—the first since martial law in the '80s. My officemate, Norie, told me that she had actually thought, briefly, that martial law might have returned.
But for there to be such general distrust and condemnation of the Arroyo administration, there was little corresponding support for the coup attempt, or even for the peaceful anti-administration rally planned for the next day. I don't know what the mood was like before the previous people-power revolution, but I can't imagine that it felt anything like this. When I asked her about the standoff, Norie summed up the general mood—she just laughed and shook her head in resignation.
If there were no crowds in the street for the standoff, there was at least some turnout for the Sumilao Farmers when they came to Manila. Still, the mood seemed far less impassioned and more resigned than I had expected. At the end of their thousand-mile march, the farmers spent their final night at Ateneo where a mass and student rally was held in their honor. Inside the beautiful, modern sanctuary, the farmers tossed their worn flip-flops onto a pile and were guests of honor next to wealthy students and camera-clad media. The Bishop of Manila came and spoke eloquently of the suffering that the farmers had endured. After communion, there was a brief call and response of “Mabuhay ang Sumilao Farmers (Long live the Sumilao Farmers).” A few fists went into the air, but the chant felt tentative, as if people were nervous to shout inside of a church. As best I can characterize it, the mood was more pained and sorrowful than indignant or impassioned. An American friend who had marched with the farmers echoed my appraisal. No one could doubt the farmers' determination; they had walked for two months, and I didn't doubt the sincerity of the priests or congregation, though clearly their commitment was of a different order. Still, considering that the farmers were on their way to demand justice from the government, the mood in the church occasionally bordered on defeatist.
Though the mass conveyed an atmosphere of Christian suffering, the rally's tone was closer to a student award ceremony. On the quad, the farmers sat in folding chairs, facing the stage while speakers got up one after another to thank each other for putting together the event. They spoke in a mixture of Tagolog and English—two languages the farmers didn't speak. There were videos, music, a skit, and many representatives from this organization or that. It all felt very self-congratulatory, almost as if the organizers thought that this rally was the accomplishment in and of itself, rather than the farmer's incredible march and the concessions that they hoped to force from the government. Just as in the sociology class, this relatively superficial “student activism” felt surprisingly familiar. I felt like I could have been on the quad of any American university, watching some sort of fundraising event that was well-intentioned, but hardly earth-shattering.
The one break in this pervasive mood came from a man named Ed Garcia, a peace activist who had been a fixture since the Marcos era. My politically oriented American friend described him simply as “legendary.” He stepped onstage with the demeanor of a warrior, battle-weary but still committed to the fight. I couldn't understand most of his speech, but the tone was perfectly clear. He spoke forcefully and earnestly, his voice conveying a sense of anger and injustice, but also hope and urgency. Where others seemed to speak over the farmers to the crowd of students, Ed Garcia spoke in turn directly to them, and then to the broader audience, making sure that the farmers remained the focus. At one point, after speaking of his deep respect for the farmers, he stopped and made sure his sentiments were translated to Visayan, the language the farmers spoke. Where others seemed to act as if the work had already been accomplished, he—the one person who had the right to rest on his laurels—spoke instead from the trenches, trying to motivate others to join him in the grunt work of the struggle. But it didn't feel like many were responding to the call.
I've often puzzled over the relative lack of political involvement of my generation, myself included. I came to college expecting to be an activist, thinking of myself as an activist. But while my sensibilities didn't change, I rarely found myself doing much that could truly qualify as activism. Volunteering, sure; perhaps well-meaning “civic engagement;” but never true activism. No protests or rallies, or teach-ins or boycotts. And I felt like part of a broader pattern. What activism I did see often felt fractured and tentative, if not downright silly—the activism of the “Facebook generation.” Not that there weren't plenty of good, innovative, and noble deeds and projects, but rarely did we aim at the system, at making big change or expressing collective outrage. There were no Iraq war protests, no widespread demands for President Bush's resignation. We were angry and disenchanted, but not enough to do anything about it.
To the degree that I thought about it, I assumed this was a product of today's America. I was a feature of a society where, really, things weren't that bad or where deep, widespread change seemed unrealistic. This lack of engagement was, perhaps, a product of a society that stressed individualism and personal success. Whatever it was, I thought of the apathy, or at least the lack of activism, as something uniquely American.
So perhaps it was simply my perspective as a disenchanted activist, and my frustration with the United States and with myself, but I was ready to find robust and dynamic activism in the Philippines. I didn't know how I would react to it, but I thought it would exist. There is certainly plenty for people to be angry about: the Arroyo administration has, by most people's appraisal, blatantly bribed and cheated its way through the five years since people-power ushered in the president. Since then, there have been more than 800 extra-judicial killings and almost 200 “disappearances.” Even if parts of the economy are thriving, the average Filipino is not, especially as the rising value of the peso means that overseas remittances—the single biggest force in the economy—are suddenly worth 20 percent less than they were a year ago.
At least among the people that I interact with, there is no support for the Arroyo administration. When, in jest, I gave Jimmy the hypothetical option of killing Gloria Arroyo, George Bush, or Osama bin Laden, he responded without hesitation: “Well of course I'd kill Gloria.” Somewhat more seriously, Leslie, another friend of mine has several times told me she looks at the daily news and wonders when it will be time to take to the streets. Many of the columnists in the daily papers are actively encouraging it.
Yet in a place where popular overthrow is a completely plausible option, almost no one seems to be taking it seriously. Perhaps religion is a part of it. The church, at least in its finer moments, is a major advocate of social justice. Still, it seems to offer a different sort of activism, one that is more about suffering and martyrdom than demanding and driving change. It is a strong moral force, but not always a politically charged one. Still, the, church played a central role in the two people-power revolutions, with the rather unfortunately named Cardinal Sin lending the moral authority and manpower of the church to the opposition. But for whatever reason, that same sentiment seems to be absent now, despite a sense that thing are worse than during the previous administration, and starting to dangerously resemble the abuses of martial law.
Perhaps the explanation comes in the rest of Leslie's comment, even as she too, seems to be puzzled at the general lack of outrage. After contemplating taking to the streets, she wonders, “But who would we put into power instead?” This is the crux of the problem. There is no ideologically coherent opposition, no meaningful parties defined by anything other than personality, and no heroic symbol of a different vision for the country. In fact, politicians are virtually expected to be self-serving and corrupt, if only a little less blatantly than Arroyo.
As exciting and romantic the idea of a peaceful people-power revolution might seem to me, Filipinos have learned the hard way that it is meaningless if there is no better order with which to replace the old one. The method of changing leadership is ultimately irrelevant if the leadership itself is not truly different. And in this respect, for all its differences, the United States and the Philippines may not be so different after all. In that light, the familiarly lackluster activism of my younger generation isn't so surprising. In fact, as I look at the United States, I get the feeling that maybe there is finally, tentatively, some potential for a significant social and political change. In the Philippines, despite its marches, revolutionary forces and coup attempts, I see no such glimmers on the horizon. Filipinos, it seems, have already come to this conclusion.
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