The Nation Is Now: Let the Youth Share Its Present

Every 12th of August, organizations parade brilliant young minds across articles for International Youth Day. The youth are handed microphones, seated on panels, and branded with big bold letters: Aspiring student-leaders, the upcoming generation, the future. They invite us, the youth, into a room, almost as mascots, because once we voice modern ideas that go against the set-in-stone standard, the script flips. Despite all those inspirational youth stories, there is a reality we, the youth, face every day—one where we are constantly told to tone it down and rewrite our scripts. Truth is, when we speak about certain topics—such as the psychological toll of navigating such an uncertain future, or challenging deeply ingrained habits that society has accepted as the norm—we are mostly dismissed and not taken seriously. This has created a sort of branding for today’s youth: Too sensitive, too woke. Talk about climate change and geopolitical tensions, and we are told that we are worrying about things that don’t even touch us. They frame it as mere unearned anxiety. There would be mocking dismissals on social media; one that caught my eye the most was: “Ganitong kahina na ba ang pag-asa ng bayan na sinasabi ni Rizal?” How certain corners of society love to throw Jose Rizal’s words in our faces when we fall short of their expectations and outdated standards of the past, which they call “tough love”. Words that are meant to fuel the youth are twisted into weaponized shame for showing vulnerability. At the same time, it is also used to burden us with being the hope of this world, while simultaneously denying agency to act like it. The youth is seen as incapable, with this generation’s more inclusive empathy synonymous with weakness—as if speaking up in dysfunctional systems that single us out doesn’t already take a lot of courage. “Masyado ka pang bata para makaintindi.” It is something we relentlessly hear when we share our perspective on an issue, as if our youth takes away our participation chances. We are told to wait our turn, and wait until we’re older to be taken seriously. Ang kabataan ang pag-asa ng bayan. This is often viewed as the youth being the hope promised for our nation. However, hope is a destination we will never reach if we are not allowed to move today. The nation is not a future state. It doesn’t wait for us in twenty years while we are required to go through tests of suffering to earn respect; it is a present reality that does not pause for us to grow up. We are living through today’s crises now, and we will live through them in decades down the line. Eventually, there will be a new generation born into whatever chaos exists by then, and offer us a new perspective in return. We should perpetuate a cycle which acknowledges that experience isn’t just how many decades a person has lived; it is proximity to a problem. And the youth’s proximity to these global problems is undeniable—because our lived reality now is telling us what kind of fallout we are surviving today, and what kind of world we are going to inherit tomorrow. A cycle of patterns and decisions being made for us but not truly seeing us. People always say they stand for the youth, but it’s about time we stand with the youth. We are not passive watchers, beneficiaries, or charity cases to be given a seat and a microphone for the sake of attention and buzzwords. We are also living through one world crisis after another, and we are not sitting and waiting for decades to earn the right to worry and act. This doesn’t mean that hard-earned wisdom of the older generations goes unnoticed, but we must bridge the gap between those who lived the past and the ticking realities of the present. The past offers guidance, but it does not give us the momentum to address today’s issues because that is something within us, those who are born and grew up in this new era. But with this momentum we are not asking to be put on a pedestal of some sort. Respect comes with responsibility, and failure to meet those responsibilities comes with consequences. There will be accountability, but let accountability mean owning our mistakes and working to be better, and not shut out the entirety of the youth’s validity. And standing with the youth starts right there and not with grand institutional gestures, but with something smaller in size but meaningful: being comfortable with listening and adapting, being open to modern realities such as unlearning the habits of silent endurance, weighing our insights on national news as valid concerns. To stand with the youth means viewing our enthusiasm as necessary urgency and not just pure youthful idealism. It means letting us be capable thinkers of today, instead of distant leaders of a tomorrow that may never come—and this starts with truly understanding what is being asked of us in the first place. Ang kabataan ang pag-asa ng Bayan. Rizal wrote that immortalized masterpiece at just eighteen years old, with nothing but a pen he exposed the cruelty of the Spanish colonial rule, and united Filipinos—all of which happened during most of his youth. Rizal did not wait for a future to act. He did not wait for his turn, because if he did, there would be no rightful future to act in. Rizal was acting in the heat of his present moment, our historical past. If we don’t act now, what kind of historical past are we writing for the future? What visions will the future see when they lay their eyes on us? Are we the youth who stood for something, or the youth who stood for nothing? We are not going to wait to become citizens of this country because the nation is now and forever will be in motion. The world doesn’t stop spinning—the past, the present, and our future are a history that never stops watching us—and we are already both participants and collateral of this very world. To stand with the youth is to recognize that the nation is breathing and surviving right now, and we are no longer waiting for tomorrow. We are already here.