Capinpuyan| 1 Aimee Lorraine C. Capinpuyan Mr. Maximino Pulan Jr.

En 101 M02 Mar 07 Saving Our Youth In high school I was an eager freshman and an exhausted senior. Towards the final months of my stay in Kong Hua, I felt like I had nothing more to gain from school, especially since my fate as a Health Sciences major in the Ateneo had already been ascertained. Graduation practices were, for me, a waste of time did anyone really care how perfectly timed our bows were? and were often spent enumerating the ways in which my friends and I could destroy Kong Hua before we left it for good. However, even devising plans of burning down the cafeteria grew tiresome after a while. Not wanting to mimic our parents and teachers by discussing our imminent college lives, for our distraction purposes we turned to the only other immediate source of confusion and conflict Philippine society. We were at that point in our lives where social awareness was all the rage. It was considered cool to be well-equipped with the latest statistics on the Philippine 2010 elections, and this, I found, was a surprising (and very welcome) shift from having to memorize factoids about Korean pop icons in order to rank up in our collectively imagined High School Student Hierarchy. The trend, as I saw it, all started when a group of seniors (handsome members of the basketball varsity notorious for spending class hours in Internet cafes) decided to christen their circle of friends with

Capinpuyan| 2 the name S.O.Y., or, as their Facebook fan page explains, Save Our Youth. Because of their ambitious and misleading name, plenty of the younger students mistook the S.O.Y. for a youth activism group. Filled with hope at the supposed goodwill brought about by a group of good-looking truants, they decided that they too wanted to be involved in the countrys affairs. And so, for weeks there was an onslaught of inspirational, nationalistic Facebook statuses. Students came to school wearing jackets patterned after the Philippine flag. The school paper received a total of seventeen poems about social issues, each from a different person (normally the paper is lucky to receive even one submission). The teachers, excited by this fresh display of interest, decided to fuel the fire by adding Is there still hope for our country?-type essay questions to their exams. I knew it was all a passing trend, that my generation would no sooner discard nationalism than it would an ugly pair of camouflage pants, but I couldnt help but be filled with hope - lots of it. Maybe we werent such a messed-up bunch after all. I soon found our graduation practices being interspersed with conversations about the elections. Our plans of razing down the school were quickly replaced with squabbles about why this candidate was better than that. I was chiefly a listener at these debates, but when asked, I would say my candidate of choice was Noynoy - he seemed like a nice enough guy. Plus, both of my parents liked him, which seemed like reason enough to vote him president. Majority of the country seemed to be smitten with him, too; by the time we graduated, Noynoy maintained his big lead over Villar. In April, the Save Our

Capinpuyan| 3 Youth mentality that I expected to wear off a long time ago had unexpectedly intensified, both in the virtual community and in the country itself. Online, the debates I had thought were confined to the gaps in our graduation practices somehow managed to find their way into our Facebook discussions. Blogging site servers were loaded with art and prose meant to inspire Filipino pride (my personal favorite being the image of a Philippine flag superimposed on the text, Where I come from, everyones a hero). And, after having attended Noynoys rally (along with about a fifth of the entire population of Cagayan de Oro), I was feeling more and more hopeful about the future of my country. I was certain that my batch could change the Philippines for the better, that we could repair the damage done by the generations before us. I believed it was all a matter of faith in a new presidency and faith in our own selves. Finally, it was time for the actual day of the elections, and my friends and I had signed up as PPCRV volunteers. Consisting of only five steps, our job at the Voters Assistance Desk sounded easy enough: should a voter need our assistance in remembering his precinct number or in locating her room, we were to search the database in the provided laptops for the needed information. The first few minutes of the day went by uneventfully, but then there came a voter whose name couldnt be located in any of the databases. Then came another, and another. They were told to

Capinpuyan| 4 speak to COMELEC. To do so, however, they had to wait in line for at least an hour, and in some cases, COMELEC only referred the voters back to us at the front desk! It was all a very ugly tennis match, with the voters being referred between COMELEC and PPCRV back and forth, back and forth, and there was nothing more my friends and I could do than sit and watch the ugliness of it all slowly play out. In the end, about half of the people whose names werent in the database ended up going home without voting. The half that persisted did eventually get to vote when, later on in the afternoon, the problem was fixed all it took was a quick database update. On June 8, 2010, the canvassing period ended, with Noynoy winning by a landslide. It wasnt a surprising victory; hed been leading in the polls for a long time, and all of his opponents, save for Erap Estrada, conceded defeat only a day after the elections. The Philippines was congratulated for having had its first peaceful automated elections. The angry complaints from some of my batch mates at the outcome of the elections (Id rather have Erap win than Noynoy!) subsided after a week or so, as the whole country transitioned to a new administration. I was going through a transition period myself, as college was starting, and so was my new life in Manila. My high school batch, the S.O.Y. included, was scattered around the country, dissolving with them the hype that they had once created in Kong

Capinpuyan| 5 Hua. The trend they set had turned out to be just that - a trend, albeit one that lasted slightly longer than camouflage jeans. On June 30, 2010, President Benigno Aquino Simeon III was officially inaugurated as President of the Philippines, and even though I now realize my old reasons for supporting him are petty, I have not lost hope in our generation. Still, I cannot help but wonder if the student bodys response to S.O.Y. would have been as positive had they realized that the true meaning of it was Sex Our Yayas.