Shouting at the world

I had the idea for this in the jeep ride home, while I was on a caffeine and adrenaline high. Even now, my fingers can’t stop shaking.

The world seems to be ending. The Supreme Court had voted to allow Ferdinand Marcos to be moved to the Libingan ng mga Bayani, burying, not the man’s remains but the truth, burying

also the thousands hurt and killed and kidnapped during his rule, effectively demonizing the historic Edsa Revolution of 1986 and pitting infrastructure against the thousands of desaparecidos who have yet to be found.

Donald Trump, a mediocre businessman born into money, an accused child rapist, a misogynist, xenophobic, racist and ableist of a man, has won the US presidency.

Our own Donald Trump, Rodrigo Duterte, has made sexist comments about Vice President Leni Robredo, the respect he seemingly had for her now revealed for what it is—a tolerance of her presence, and an objectification of her body. Our President, who promotes rape culture by his speech and manner, who has promised that every year of his term will be a bloody war on drug users and pushers, convicted by court or by karton, during whose mere months in office more than 4,000 have been killed…

As much as 22 percent of the Great Barrier Reef died just this year, Harambe the gorilla was shot dead, Vine will soon shut down, and the human race is hurtling toward climate disaster. And just a few moments ago there was a magnitude 4.9 earthquake.

Ironically, it was the earthquake that gave me hope.

Over intellectual discourse and reassurances, it was this animal, visceral rush of adrenaline that made me glad to be alive. Last night I did not want to go to school, or even get up from my bed. Human extinction was growing more and more preferable than life where women, sexual and gender minorities, people of color and disabled people and drug dependents are hated and still experience systematic oppression.

But I am alive, and the world is not over.

I have hope yet because in US exit polls, the millennial vote was overwhelmingly in favor of the Democratic Party’s candidate. I have hope yet because it is millennials who are standing alongside those who lived through martial law, decrying the injustice and the atrocities of the Marcos regime.

The notion that millennials are apathetic, uneducated and forgetful doesn’t do us justice. Sure, the millennials are not a generation of saints—there are those who believe that the atrocities of martial law are relative, or who don’t care at all what happens. But it is unfair to make all of us the scapegoat for the apathy and forgetfulness of society. After all, the nine justices who voted in favor of the Marcos burial in the Libingan are not millennials. The people who voted Trump into power are not millennials. The people supporting VP Leni against the gross disrespect of her intellect and person are millennials.

So the world seems to be ending. We have misogynists and fascists in positions of power. The environment is dying before our eyes, World War III seems imminent, and Toblerone has changed its shape. But the world hasn’t ended yet. It is still spinning, and it will spin on, like some demented hamster wheel, as long as we still march, as long as our feet still move, as long as we have not stopped firing away at our keyboards.

The landscape of society is changing; virtual is just as valid and makes just as much of an impact as physical. The virtual world is where protests are born and where they translate into physical marches. The generations who say social interaction is dead because we are glued to our smartphones don’t understand that social media is where we mobilize, where we organize, where ideas spread, and where discourse occurs.

It’s often said that tweeting and posting are the equivalent of shouting into the void. I disagree. We are shouting at the world, and it’s up to the world to listen to us instead of dismissing us. We are the voices in social media, fighting rape culture, fighting sexism, fighting historical revisionism. We are not the vapid, ignorant cyborgs that older generations make us out to be.

We are hope.

We are your hope.

Daniela Castillo, 18, is a psychology freshman at the University of the Philippines Diliman.