A young man I spoke with recently — early twenties, sharp, about to finish his degree —
told me he had never voted and did not plan to. He wasn’t angry about it. He said it the
way you’d mention the weather. Wala namang mangyayari. Nothing will happen
anyway.
What stayed with me wasn’t the opinion. It was that he had reached it without ever
testing it. He had never lined up to register, never followed a project long enough to
watch it finish or stall, never filed a complaint and waited for the answer that doesn’t
come. He had skipped straight to the conclusion it took my generation years of
disappointment to reach — and inherited it secondhand, fully formed, before he had a
reason of his own.
That is the part worth sitting with. There was a time when distrust of government was
something people earned the hard way. They voted. They sat through barangay
assemblies. They watched the groundbreaking for a road or a health center, took the
official at his word, and waited. Sometimes for years. When the promise kept colliding
with the unfinished, the overpriced, the quietly abandoned, they slowly stopped
believing. That resignation came from somewhere. It was paid for in experience.
What troubles me is how many young Filipinos now land in the same place without
paying anything at all. They haven’t followed the issues. Many have never voted. Yet the
verdict is already in them, settled, before the first real encounter. The conclusion has
stopped being a conclusion. It has become an inheritance.
We rarely teach our children what we believe about government. We don’t sit them
down for it. They just watch us. A child raised around people who read learns to respect
books without a single lecture. He notices, too, when his father says there’s no point
reporting the broken streetlight because no one will come. He catches the eye-roll at the
evening news, the joke about which official took what, the way every election gets
discussed as a choice between disappointments. Nobody in that house ever says do
not trust the government. The child absorbs it anyway.
And the inherited kind is the harder one to undo. A person who once believed can
believe again; somewhere in him is the memory of expecting better, a place to return to
if things improve. The young man I met has no such place. You cannot restore a trust
that was never there.
It shapes far more than whether they vote. They assume the proper channel will fail, so
they reach for the shortcut, the fixer, the connection, before they even try the official
window. And accountability, in the end, runs on expectation. Officials answer to people
who expect to be answered. Remove the expectation and you remove most of the pressure. A broken promise costs a politician very little when almost no one was counting on it.
There is a quieter loss too. The brightest students I meet are headed for business,
medicine, tech, the BPOs, or a plane out. Public service barely comes up. It isn’t that
they weighed it and walked away — it never made the list. So the institutions that most
need capable people keep losing them, and the weakness left behind becomes the next
batch’s proof that nothing there can change. The cycle tightens by one turn each time.
From the outside, nothing looks wrong. The lines still form on election day. The jingles
still blast from the jeepneys. Turnout looks healthy on paper. But participation and belief
have quietly come apart. People keep going through the motions while expecting almost
nothing from them — and a democracy can carry a lot of weight until that gap grows too
wide.
So when a young person asks Bakit pa? — why bother — we’re too quick to call it
laziness or ingratitude. Most of the time it’s neither. It’s a fair reading of everything he
has watched his whole life. He isn’t refusing to think about government. He has thought
about it exactly as much as the evidence around him deserved.
Which is why slogans won’t fix it. You cannot order people into confidence any more
than you could order them into despair. Both are learned the same way — by watching
what actually happens. A permit that comes out on the promised day. A complaint that
gets an honest answer. A project that ends where the ribbon said it would. Small things,
easy to dismiss. They are also the lessons the next generation is quietly writing down.
The most dangerous thing a republic can hand its children is not poverty or hardship. It
is the belief that nothing will ever get better — because once that settles into a culture,
every reform starts already behind. For too many young Filipinos, resignation has
become an inheritance. The work of governance is to make hope one again.
And before we blame the young for giving up, we should sit with the harder question.
Not what we want from our leaders, but what we are quietly raising our children to
expect. As parents, is this really the inheritance we meant to leave them?
From the upcoming book The Resigned Republic
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and
are intended to encourage public discussion on governance and national issues. They
do not represent any official position of the institutions the author may be affiliated with.
About the Author:
Paul Y. Chua, PhD, holds doctoral degrees in Fiscal Management and Peace and
Security, and a master‘s degree in National Security Administration. He has completed
executive programs in several countries, specializing in transport, migration, urban
planning, and public policy, with emphasis on governance, innovation, and integrity.