The first of May, the celebration of the struggle of working men around the world to uphold their rights and welfare: a fitting backdrop for the conclusion of my first month as a full-time volunteer in the Computer Professionals' Union.
I am not new to the concept of serving the people. For a long time, I have been an activist in the University of the Philippines, a tradition that seems to have been handed down from my parents, who were both activists in UP Diliman themselves during the Marcos Era. The years I've spent learning of the realities of Philippine Society might account for what some of my college peers perceived as "an unnecessary abundance in altruism." But I never did see my motivation to live true to UP's Oblation as unnatural. While my batchmates have quickly finished their theses and graduated in pursuit of careers in advertising, I have alotted an extra year for my thesis, a documentary on the Philippine climate change experience, in an effort to help the rural poor, they who bear the brunt of the denigrating environment the most, help themselves. "Our thesis adviser told us that theses in our college are supposed to be socially relevant," I reasoned. "Yours is too relevant," my father quipped.
Money, Money, Money
Wanting to experience first-hand the application of my craft in the harsh world of the adult life, I came to CPU. Probably a raving lunatic to my fellow batchmates now, for all I know. The general sentiment is that I'm wasting my parents' (and the taxpayers') investments in the youth for delaying my education and not finding a high-paying job. In fact, money seems to be the center of all sides of a debate these days, what with the global economic crisis worsening by the second. OFWs do not fly to the other side of the globe just for the hell of it, it's mandatory in order to support their respective families. Students taking lucrative courses and vocations might have done so because they wanted to, but the probable motivation for their want is their perception of marketable courses as investments. Again, the money.
My generation is now so caught up in the struggle to make ends meet that we fail to realize the futility of such an exercise. Year in and year out we hear of sob stories speaking of the hardships in securing a decent, fulfilling job, and yet we continue to attribute it to a "lack of effort and strategy." And yet we Filipinos still haven't understood how to take these social phenomena on. What an amnesia the rumble of the tummy or the twinkle of the greedy eye can cause!
Collective Action is the Way Forward
I remember a famous saying that goes: "the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." The plight we face everyday has imbibed a collective amnesia to us, the way hunger pangs make us forget every other problem. We have collectively forgotten that the problems we individually experience is a problem that our fellow Filipinos similarly go through, and as such we have forgotten that the solution cannot achieved by the individual alone. All our life we have been indoctrinated with a culture that espouses tolerance of exploitation, and fear of defiance, that we have conveniently forgotten how the Katipuneros and Huks and other revolutionaries that peppered our history gave their lives so that we remember. It's the same drug that makes us forget that before we are IT/computer professionals and advocates, we are, first and foremost, Filipino citizens.
The past month has been a wonderful experience, and CPU doesn't fail to remind me of my role as a citizen. We have rendered trainings and various other services to different Non-Government and People's Organizations in our thrust to contribute our abilities to the general movement for meaningful social change. On labor day, we directly participated in the celebration by joining the ranks of progressive workers, peasants, students and other sectors in our clamour for greater social welfare and justice. This night of a thousand torches has rekindled my conviction that this path that we have taken, though less travelled, is the surest path not to fortune nor to fame, but to change.
The author is a UPD Visual Communications Major volunteering as a visual artist for the Computer Professionals' Union.
