 |
Image from
panitikangaktibista.blogspot.com |
WHY do we
deserve such kind of dismissive treatment from your dying generation?
Do we deserve such treatment because we’re young and we remind you
constantly of the brush of death painting black the white fence of your cabin
in the next life? Must we rein in our zealousness for progress because yours
has been proven old and ineffective?
What your generation exhibits is merely a brazen disregard for the march
of time and the cadence of change.
All of us are on a queue to the after-life; to the abyss of infinite
unconsciousness. But how dare you deprive us the opportunity to breathe new
life to this arid landscape of ideas? Weren’t you young once?
Weren’t you so rebellious as we are now? Constantly chipping out on
the concrete façade of inertia you have been as we are doing today.
Some of you aging denizens dare call Millennials stubborn and
whimsical when that was what the elderly of your time described your generation
of rebelliousness.
Heaped upon the punks, rockers of the seventies and student activists
were adjectives that placed many of them in prison or the cold confines of
coffins. Yet, deep inside your hearts you longed for the sex, drugs and rock and
roll offered by these so-called “rabble-rousers.”
So how dare you put us in a box that confines our creativity when many
of you sought to advance the dictum of “Thinking outside the box.” Hypocrites
now many of you have become.
Why, when many of you pushed for change in the decade of the Vietnam
War and Woodstock, you are now pathetically clinging to the “Glory Days” of
activism?
Please, wake up. Those days are
gone; kaput.
What you are seeing today are the forces of the New, who are now
constantly challenging your old ideas as ineffectual.
Have you forgotten what the dead man 6-feet under in an unkempt
graveyard in Berlin have said: Change is the only constant. The old would be
challenged by the new; that there would be a conflict between the old and the
new and the fusion of the old and the new would be the key to the progress of
civilization.
National ID system? Been there, been that; dictator Ferdinand Marcos
even has a pamphlet about this albeit also not original (many were copied from
Mein Kampf). Martial law in Mindanao? The entire country was under the control
of Marcos and his cronies. And what did that lead to?
These are old ideas that failed because they were that: old.
The old year bows down to a new year. Resolutions are made, broken and
re-booted. That is how men and women develop; that is how societies are born,
die and re-birthed: constant change; unceasing revolution and new generation of
revolutionaries.
And we know that after us there would be new revolutionaries; the
youth who would challenge the old order we would impose later on as you do
today. Because that is how societies reach what is considered progress: the
dying of the old and the birth of the new. But give us the chance to
participate in that process of rebirth.
Of course we are grateful. Many of you fought for the new as your
generation was also subjected to the condescension by the old generation.
Forgive us because your time is ending but ours is just beginning.
So step aside, old farts because if you don’t, we’ll run over you.
