“The youth is the hope of the future but the despair of the present”, so quipped my Jesuit friend, the late Fr. Guido Arguelles, S.J.
Party-list Rep. Raymond Palatino for the youth may have retracted his proposed bill banning religious celebrations and symbolism in public offices with a “wow-mali” due to a wave of protesting howls even from his own colleagues in the Kabataan party-list, but there remains a disturbing swirl in my mind. It makes some quarters, especially conservatives, wary and worried about the state of our youth today.
From what inspiration or model in contemporary philosophy or sociology the youthful congressman is sourcing his queer thoughts on a “God-ban in all government offices” remains to be exposed. It could be a sociological paradigm of an overly democratic, all fair, all square approach to equality in practically every human activity including religion. The American pattern could easily lend an exemplary hand to the youthful mind as the American government banned all prayers in all public schools and public offices.
Or it could be an atheistic outlook espoused by the conventional communist ideology of the Marxist-Leninist opiate effect of religion to the proletariat masses, or perhaps the more Asian version of the great Mao.
With a leftist orientation, being a student activist and former president of the left-leaning National Union of Students of the Philippines (NUSP), we can’t help but weave Rep. Palatino into the tapestry of religious indifference or pragmatic atheism.
Furthermore, in this country, the practice of religion is summarily external, devotional and emotional. The religious symbolisms, for instance, images and icons, gory representations of a suffering Jesus Christ or the heart of his mother Mary bleeding profusely from sorrow or simply rosaries hanging from the neck, or a worn out novena in Baclaran, can evoke powerful attitudes and mind set for hope, faith, personal and collective catharsis which puts the person in a state of unexplained complacency no matter how fleeting such feeling would become.
And if this kind of religious sentiment and display is the target of Palatino’s botched bill, then we have a deeper problem. Our present society may be producing young people who may have forgotten that there are other emotions beside hatred, anger and indifference with which they are becoming so familiar.
We are developing an emotion-less breed of young people.
I still remember wiping my teary eyes and runny nose as my mother would expound her “homily” on how disobedient we have been and how despite their efforts to turn the night into day just to sustain our schooling, we still manage to turn in very low marks on our report card. Well, try doing that to your kids nowadays and they would simply turn their backs sneering at you with parting remarks such as, “That’s what you get from watching too much telenovelas.”
Indeed, as they turn their backs on you, straight away they go back to their PCs, Internet, FaceBook and Twitter or computer games ‘til the wee hours of the night. Definitely, the IT saturated environment we have today does have a chunk in our youth’s transformation. As they say in English, “Tell me who your friends are and I will tell you who you are.”
If our young would keep on talking to the machine, then time comes when they would be as cold as a machine, emotionless and mindless and robotic.
The Filipino brand of religiosity thrives on symbolisms and celebrations that evoke powerful emotions. At this point however, some daring, cold and religiously indifferent young people who have detached themselves from traditional ties to the faith culture are now exerting efforts to dislodge such dispositions from the Filipino psyche. Momentarily, they failed as Palatino himself admitted. In the meantime, the sad question is that… could this be some clear and present danger signals into which our youth is metamorphosing?