| Sweet Bird of Youth By Antonio C. Abaya November 14, 2002 Would my friends Mahar Mangahas of the Social Weather Stations (SWS) and Pepe Miranda of Pulse Asia please consider doing a survey on the attitudes of the young people (ages 18 to 35) of this country? Collectively, this age group makes up, if memory serves, more than 50 percent of the electorate. Their opinions and attitudes and expectations should, therefore, be an eye-opener not only for politicians and marketing specialists, but also for economists, social planners, political scientists and opinion makers concerned with the future of this country. This age group, after all, will inherit this earth after we are gone. What do they think we are bequeathing to them, a potential paradise or a certain hellhole? I would be happy if they thought they will be taking over a nondescript, unspectacular, boringly ordinary but, at least, reasonably functioning and reasonably livable slice of the planet. But even that modest hope seems to be too optimistic, if I am to believe my children and their friends and the children of my friends, all in their twenties and thirties. To them, this country has no future and many, if not most, of them are preparing to migrate to other lands or are seriously thinking of it. My three children, all of whom took part in EDSA 1 and EDSA 2, have given notice that if there is going to be an EDSA 4, they are not interested in joining it; they will stay home instead and watch their DVD movies, or surf the Net with their computers, or sleep. They have grown extremely cynical of ALL politicians and they see no one in the horizon or even below it who can fix such a broken down country, so why should they go out of their way again to rally in the streets for someone, anyone, who will just disappoint them again in the future as two other icons disappointed them in the past? It must be said, however, that they and their peers are not typical of the young people of this country since they belong to the �right� socio-economic class and do not have to worry about their financial future. But if they who have a more or less secure tomorrow despair of the complexion of that tomorrow, then what more those in the middle class whose jobs and savings hang by a thread, what more those in the lowest rung of the economic ladder to whom life is a daily struggle for survival, �nasty, brutish and short?� ***** About seven years ago, the advertising firm McCann Erickson Philippines conducted a survey among the youth. What has stuck to my mind was its finding on which institution had the strongest influence on their thinking. It is neither the family nor the Church nor the schools nor the government, but media, that influences them the most. Specifically television and the movies. While that survey was probably conducted only among high school and college students, its findings may be valid even for the newly marrieds and the yuppies as well, with the caveat that among the young and the yuppies of the middle and upper classes, a new medium of influence has opened up in the seven years since that McCann Erickson survey, the computer. If television and the movies were the sole influences on the young, then God or Allah or Whoever help this country! In my recent article titled Good News versus Bad News, I lamented the editorial contents of the two TV news programs most watched by the masa: TV Patrol and Saksi, with their daily and relentless cataloguing of saksakan, barilan, bugbugan, patayan and gahasaan, to the exclusion of news about science, medicine, art, music, books, technology and anything else deemed too heavy for the stupid masa. (But I should mention here that shortly after Good News versus Bad News came out, ABS-CBN cleaned up TV Patrol. Gone are the daily accounts of saksakan, barilan, bugbugan, patayan and gahasaan; in their place is a new feel-good section called Kay Ganda! I also found out only last week that GMA-7�s Saksi, which I had roasted in my article of October 21, 2001 titled GMA-7: Saksi sa Kagaguhan, has been replaced (when, I do not know) by a new newscast program called Frontpage, with Mel Tiangco, and it too has a feel-good section called Buenas Balita. So, thank you, ABS-CBN, and thank you, GMA-7. There is hope, after all��.) In a recent column in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, former Supreme Court Justice Isagani A. Cruz decried the quality of the mid-day TV variety programs, with their tasteless toilet humor, their vulgar sexual innuendoes, their imposition of humiliating behavior on those who want to be �in�, all lapped up by the stupid masa who apparently have an infinite appetite for such mindless singing, dancing and laughing. Justice Cruz rightly applauded McCann Erickson for withdrawing its clients� ads from these vulgar programs unless and until they improved their contents. Another hopeful sign. As for the Filipino movie industry, what needs anyone say other than that it gave us the criminally inclined ignoramus Joseph Estrada and threatens to give us another showbiz airhead FPJ? The point is: How can anyone � even Lee Kwan Yew or Mao Zedung or Fidel Castro or Mahathir Mohamad or Nelson Mandela or Ho Chi Minh or Jawaharlal Nehru or Charles De Gaulle � possibly build a self-respecting nation in an environment in which the two most influential institutions wallow in garbage of the first ordure and have conditioned their audiences to enjoy that garbage, and nothing else but? Thank Science and Bill Gates that we have the computer and the Internet through which we can dialogue with the serious-minded among the youth about the future of this country, their country, our country. ***** This article appears in the December 2, 2002 issue of the Philippine Weekly Graphic magazine. |
DEAR TONY, I WISH YOU would pay a visit, or send one your researchers to visit, the SWS Survey Data Library, to check out the enormous amount of data that already exists. All the SWS surveys are for adults from 18 or older; to segregate the 18-35 year-olds is just a matter of tabulation, and most probably has already been done so that one can just check the hard copy file. SWS did the 1996 and 1997 National Youth Surveys (age group 15-30) which were sponsored by the National Youth Commission; raw data on CD-ROM are for sale to the public. Relative indifference to politics is, if I recall right, a characteristic of the youth; but why rely on my memory when the library is there, open to the public and with a librarian to give service. Plus, check out the SWS papers and publications. Mahar Mangahas, Social Weather Stations. [email protected]. December 01, 2002 ���������������������������� TONY, A PROFILE of Filipinos 18 to 35 years old � their perceptions, opinions, sentiments and attitudes regarding contemporary Philippine society and its developmental prospects for the next ten to 20 years � has been begging to be done for the last three decades at least. One does not exaggerate much in describing such a project as an urgent national security concern. It would be good if people could help generate funds to enable a dedicated survey of this group to be done by a competent, preferably academic and non-partisan, survey group. (A dedicated national probe using a representative sample of 1,200 respondents, 18 to 35 years old and employing a 30-item questionnaire, could probably make do with a million pesos. If the survey analysts consented to a labor of love and patriotically subsidized the venture, the survey cost could even drop to about P700,000 to P800,000.) Short of a dedicated survey, you may have competent survey outfits that will not charge � or do so minimally � to test perhaps 5 or 6 of the most urgent items relevant to establishing the opinions/sentiments/attitudes of the Filipino cohort you are interested in. Such items will �ride� as a separate module in these companies� regular surveys. Analysis will be based on the general sample�s subset of those 18 to 35 years old, probably about 400 to 500 respondents, and would be good enough for a general reading at the national level. (Partly subsidized by the survey outfits, five such items would cost about P100,000 to P150,000.) Pulse Asia is ready to assist in monitoring this critical age group of young adult Filipinos. However, our current resources do not make it possible for Pulse Asia to single-handedly finance the project you identified. I hope you and others can work together to enable this project to take off. Regards. Pepe Miranda, Pulse Asia. [email protected]. December 09, 2002 ���������������������������� MY 13-YR OLD daughter, a St. Scholastica high school student, is driven by a powerful desire to be a citizen of the world. She specifically wants to locate herself in Canada or in Western Europe. When we brought her to Hong Kong seven years ago, she blurted out when our bus was leaving the airport that she�d want to live there because it was a clean place. At the turn of the millennium, she was in Vancouver where she developed an obsession not to live here (in the Philippines) anymore. We respect our daughter�s worldview. And indeed we encourage her to be the best of what she is so she can excel wherever in the world she decides to be. Vic de Jesus. [email protected]. December 01, 2002 ��������������������������� MR. ABAYA, Wonderful, simply wonderful!!! And warmest congratulations on your success with ABS-CBN and GMA-7. Please keep on letting those fingers hit the keyboard�Kind regards. Johannes Jahns. [email protected]. December 01, 2002 ����������������������������� DEAR TONY, What is needed is a book, not the SWS, Social Weather, Pulse type of which frankly I have little confidence. The format/style of the book would be like �Division Street America� which came out during the Nam Years. It involved three to five-page portraits of characters of mainly youth. Yours with relish. Ross Tipon. [email protected]. December 02, 2002 MY REPLY. Why don�t YOU write that book, although it must be understood that the portraits of several young people cannot be considered a scientific cross section of that age group. Studs Turkel, who, I think, wrote �Division Street,� certainly made no claims that his subjects were demographically typical of American youth at that time. ���������������������������� DEAR TONY, I hope that our media can coordinate with our educational institutions in jointly helping educate and train our youth and giving tips on what they on their individual says, begin to help solve our problems. They can start in their own community. Remember a nation is composed of provinces, towns, barrios, communities and families. Start with the family and the community. Tony Joaquin. [email protected]. December 05, 2002 MY REPLY. Because our media are profit-oriented, they will not do anything that will detract from their search for profit unless morally pressured to do so by a visionary leader who will set the moral tone for the whole of society. OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO |
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| OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Reactions to �Sweet Bird of Youth� Read your articles �Good News versus Bad News� and �Sweet Bird of Youth� and thoroughly liked both. Thank you for articles like that. I have suddenly become your avid fan. :) LMB. [email protected]. December 13, 2002 ���������������������������� |