I was asked recently what role I thought the youth ought to play in elections. Like most everyone else, the first thing that came to mind was the number of young people being projected to vote in 2016. But then I realized that reducing to a statistic like that, no matter how impressive those stats are, was doing the youth a great disservice.
Without even thinking too long about it, I can easily identify at least three ways that the youth can significantly participate in public elections.
The youth as think tank
IF candidates only considered elections as a real job-application process, they would probably be more inclined to present actual ideas and workable plans for the government and governance. And if they were so inclined, then the best possible thing they could do is to turn to the youth for ideas.
The youth, after all, benefit from sitting at the intersection of three very important and influential forces: the bleeding edge of information and communications technology, which exposes them to the currents of the world and facilitates the way they share their thoughts—thereby sharpening them—with their peers; the innate
inquisitiveness of the young; and the relative freedom of the youthful mind from the preconceived notions of their elders, of what’s possible or not.
When they are able to effectively harness the power of these three forces, the youth are more likely to identify the most relevant needs—hint: changing street names is not actually a need—of their communities; they are certainly the most likely to come up with innovative solutions—like water bottles as light sources—and they’re also going to be the best and most hardworking advocates of their vision, simply because the youth are generally just not willing to accept the word “impossible” in their vocabularies, even if it means having to prove that you can call forth light from saltwater.
The youth as engines of change
Apart from being a supremely viable wellspring of good ideas, the youth are blessed with so much zeal and vigor that carry within them the potential to change the world.
Like Ditto Sarmiento said: “Kung hindi tayo kikilos, sino ang kikilos? Kung di tayo kikibo, sino ang kikibo? Kung hindi ngayon, kailan pa?” This exhortation speaks of the youth as engines of change, and it does so with excellent reason. The young, for all their angst, intuitively understand that the world around them is still not as perfect as it could be, and that it can be better. The angst, and the apathy, that the youth are so often accused of, only stems from their frustration that the world isn’t better. But out of that frustration can come determined efforts to effect the improvements they think their elders should have accomplished.
To be honest, I can’t blame them. Getting older sometimes also means having to settle for the way things are, allowing change to happen only at a very glacial pace. Which is why it is doubly important for the youth to be recruited to the cause of meaningful change, while they have not yet had the fires of their idealism extinguished. Who else can have the determination to turn a kariton into a library?
The youth as advocates
With the emergence of social media as the veritable lingua franca of the world, the youth of today have found—and owned—their voice. Just recently,
Oxford named the “face with tears of joy” emoji as the word of the year. And it’s not even a real word! But, as Oxford explained it, the emoji “was chosen as the ‘word’ that best reflected the ethos, mood and preoccupations of 2015.” This reasoning reflects the truth that social media is booming, and is assuming a preeminent position as a communication tool that can be used to spread any message far and wide, whether it be that it’s AlDub’s 19th weeksary or that voters should not sell their votes.
That sort of power used to be the exclusive domain of the mainstream media, but not anymore. Today, anyone with a Twitter account can set the wheels of public discourse going. More than that, though, the availability of all these communication tools means that the youth can actually educate each other.
Studies have shown repeatedly that the younger generations are increasingly turning to each other for information, often trusting the Facebook posts of friends more implicitly than, say, a story from a newspaper, or an analysis from an expert, or a teacher’s opinion. In other words, if someone tells a friend that not voting is a loser thing to do, that friend is more likely to believe him than me, if I told him the same thing.
I could go on, but then all I’d be doing is restating the obvious: any campaign that treats the youth as just another vote-rich demographic will be missing out on the many other ways young people can elevate elections.
James Arthur B. Jimenez is director of the Commission on Elections’s Education and Information Department.