Nudging young writers from Facebook to newspapers

THE MORE star MIT graduate Carmela Lao’s powerful guest column “We are all real Filipinos” (Opinion, 7/1/15) went viral on social media, the more I wondered why young writers are often absent in media debates.

Newspapers retain a special majesty, and the printed word still has a special magic that lingers in a social media age. Randy David’s column turned 20 last week and it is surreal to think that I now write in the same section. In high school, I would skip to the Inquirer’s Opinion section to receive my news interlaced with the thoughts of Randy and his peers, along with the late Justice Isagani Cruz’s endearing rants against planes flying over Merville village. That childlike wonder returned to the fore when I had lunch with Randy, Winnie Monsod, Conrado de Quiros and Peter Wallace, and when I entered the Inquirer newsroom for the first time, put faces to bylines up to our late publisher Isagani Yambot’s, and sat at founding publisher Eggie Apostol’s old desk.

I sometimes forget the printed word’s allure myself. As an Ateneo freshman, I founded a magazine on Chinese-Filipino culture called Chinoy as part of the Celadon student organization, and kept in touch with its editors long after graduating. Its current leader #TheJoshuaCheng (his team told me he is apparently so highly regarded that he is the only leader in the organization who merits his own hashtag) rebranded it to a more neutral “Elements” and insisted on maintaining its print format even as I suggested that he go digital given the difficulty of raising printing funds. When #TheJoshuaCheng handed me the first copy of his first issue, I immediately understood.

There is still a different formality, still a touch of magic to the debates that play out under the mastheads of storied newspapers like the Inquirer, and given our present demographics and level of Internet penetration, such will remain the venues for crucial national discussions in the near future. So why do young thought leaders so readily cede these traditional intellectual crossroads, content to speak to each other on Facebook?

Recall how Ateneo alumni vocally criticized students for taking selfies with Imelda Marcos at a scholarship fund event. I wrote that the Edsa generation has overlooked how an entire generation has grown up with no firsthand knowledge of events that took place 30 years ago, and Conrad de Quiros was kind enough to echo that today’s students recall Edsa akin to how their parents recall the liberation of Manila.

This seemingly obvious point made many 50-year-old patriots stop and think, yet no student has written to articulate how his generation honors but refuses to romanticize Edsa (or, as one quipped, he knows Kris but not Cory Aquino). Current students’ perspective is different but not necessarily negative. Ateneo Management Engineering alumni could honor Edgar Jopson decades late last year because recent alumni are eager to learn of what students did during martial law, beyond Edsa’s more prominent leaders.

Recall the public debate on the Bangsamoro Basic Law. Its constitutionality was central but law is not an end unto itself and, ultimately, only young Moro voices can present the context in which to apply law and tell the country what Lake Lanao means to the Maranao, what is top-of-mind for Mindanao State University student leaders, what it is like to graduate from high school in an evacuation center, or even how irritable one gets during the Ramadan fast. I criticized extreme and dubious “legal” commentaries, such as warnings that Shari’ah law in the Philippines will sanction throwing acid on women’s faces. I realized I was criticizing a retired judge and a retired advertising executive, and there were barely any counterpoints from young Moro pundits.

I encouraged Carmela to write her column and said no one could articulate the message more strongly than a fresh graduate, and have been pushing #TheJoshuaCheng to realize how society would listen to top schools’ student leaders.

Millennials now represent a third of Filipinos. Lorenzo Tan, president of RCBC and the Banker’s Association of the Philippines, shared his new priority of engaging restless millennials with different life and career goals, and asked executives to set aside how young applicants might have tried and left several jobs in a short time. Greg Navarro, head of Deloitte here and former president of the Management Association of the Philippines, described the global survey his firm commissioned just to understand millennials and their aspirations, including their widespread respect for how businesses can change communities. The country’s top business leaders take pains to try to understand the youth perspective, so why not just speak up?

I wrote against author F. Sionil José’s racist slurs in his Philippine Star column but the issue was overtaken by social media slurs against University of the Philippines valedictorian Tiffany Grace Uy. The Alliance of Filipino-Chinese Students, made up of UP, Ateneo, De La Salle University, University of Santo Tomas and University of Asia & the Pacific students, released a Facebook statement. Ateneo valedictorian Ryan Yu, Yale summa cum laude Chris Dee and many others likewise spoke out only on Facebook. They must see the huge difference when 22-year-old Carmela’s Inquirer column goes up against a 90-year-old national artist for literature’s and sells out the market of ideas.

Today’s world is changing so rapidly that it is critical for the young at the forefront of change to help the rest of the country catch up. The next Carmela knows how to send essays to the Inquirer.

* * *

React: [email protected], Twitter @oscarfbtan, facebook.com/OscarFranklinTan.