Can you imagine today’s world where women have no right to vote? Can you imagine the millennial young professional working all week, more than eight hours a day, with no benefits and overtime pay? Can you imagine a modern world where education and other basic social services are only reserved for the rich? And if you can — will you accept it?
Everyone’s right to vote, along with labor rights, access to basic social services and the rest of democracy’s blessings, did not come freely. They were paid for in life and blood.
And those who paid for them are always forgotten, misunderstood, even demonized. Who were they? The activists. Who were they? The students, teachers, workers, farmers, professionals, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, ordinary people.
The ones who stood up and spoke out.
I understand activism to be the collective engagement to pursue and bring about liberating, transforming and empowering social change for the good of one and all. An activist is both a catalyst and agent of liberating, transforming and empowering social change.
And so, when society denied women the right to vote, the suffragettes rose up. Women activists demanded the right to vote through protest actions — organized, vigorous, public demonstrations that registered their indignation against the unjust status quo and their calls to change it. Freedoms and rights are not always secured by being prim and proper.
Why do people choose to protest? Because the usual venues of grievances have proven to be inadequate and hostile. It is like Rizal explaining his cause in the kangaroo court of the Spaniards.
Why do people become activists? Because they recognize something is wrong and they seek to address it. It is a misconception that activists only complain. Activists always bear an alternative solution. And if need be, under certain conditions, they can work together with those on the opposite side.
Activism takes many forms besides the protest action. Every purposive and vigorous engagement in pursuit of a just cause, on-ground or online, is a form of activism. But what makes the protest action so important is that it ties all efforts together into one physical, collective manifestation of commitment and accountability to the cause, to fellow activists and to the people they serve. And for people’s movements, all issues are connected. The freedom of one is the freedom of all.
Young people, especially students, have always been one of the largest, most vibrant forces of the social and revolutionary movements, from the time of Spanish colonization to the bloody days of martial law, to these millennial times. The progressive student activist movement in the Philippines spans, connects and integrates its activism with the issues of the marginalized, the farmers, workers, indigenous peoples.
The historical role of student activism in the Philippines has always been to collectively pursue and bring about liberating, transforming and empowering social change. As student leader and activist Lean Alejandro put it: “Students must realize that they are both students and Filipinos. We must be concerned with both local and national issues. Students are not messiahs. We can only inform if we are informed. And the best way to be informed is to actually integrate with the people. We must help in the conscientization of our people. Helping our people find a political formulation to their immediate problems demands that the students learn from society. We need to change our society in a very fundamental way toward social and national emancipation. And the students are in a position to serve as catalysts in social transformation. That is the historical role of the students.”
Opposition to the government is not the aim of activism. Activism encourages students to critically examine reality, and if in this analysis they find injustice and inequality, and if they find that the government not only fails to address these but actually enables these inequities to thrive, then the duty to what is just and right demands that the government be engaged either in dialogue or through direct action.
To oppose injustice, its system and institutions is not a crime. Such has been the lineage of the Philippine student activist movement from the likes of Bonifacio, Rizal, Liliosa Hilao and Lean Alejandro.
Activism teaches students that to do what is right, we must call out and disobey what is wrong; and that it is not enough to know something is wrong, we must also do something about it and stand our ground as individuals integrated into the collective movement.
On a personal note: No, activists are not rabid atheists. As a member of the Student Christian Movement in my college days, as well as a student of Liberation Theology and the Social Gospel of the Evangelical Christian line, I share these truths: Poverty is an offense against God. It is not of God that some have everything while others have little to nothing. That to follow Christ means also to serve the people. And, most of all, that the poor man freed is the glory of God.
And, for the record: The activist, the revolutionary, is not fueled by hate. As Cuban revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevarra once said: “The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.” And this love is life-giving, liberating, empowering, transforming both the individual and the world.
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Dom Balmes, 27, is a technical content developer at Nokia, and a member of Dakila: Philippine Collective for Modern Heroism.