That’s my term for these young people with bluetooth earphones stuck in their ears pumping 120 decibels of rap music into their brains. Only they can hear whatever they’re listening to, so to you they look like well-dressed young adults having some kind of epileptic seizure, gyrating in perfect sync to some inaudible rhythm.
That’s what happens when you make young people wait these days. They take to their iPhone 13’s or Samsung A12’s and launch into this ethereal digital dimension occupied by online gaming creatures and Facebook trolls. They get this zombie-like look in their faces, eyes defocused, their brains marinating in purple haze. Their bodies are sitting in this classroom but they’re all floating in digital nirvana, waiting for their brains to come back.
I bang the blackboard lightly, and that seems to bring them back to life—like a pair of paddles electroshocking an arrhythmic heart back to normal beating.
“Sorry, I’m late, class…traffic,” I apologized, “and there’s no parking” I followed up for good measure. I need to have a good talk with admin, I’m willing to take a pay cut in exchange for reserved parking privilege. Anyway, late 20 minutes, I had no time to waste.
“Article II, Section 1, anybody?” I threw the first pitch. Batter up!
One upstretched hand in the 3rd row. A young lady all in pink—pink jeans, pink blouse, pink leather jacket, pink sneakers—she looked like a page out of Vogue teens.
“And your name is?”
“Pinky Maglia Rosa, sir”
“Of course,” I said and right away this class is chuckling. Hey, what do you know, their brains are BACK!
“Where is your family from, Miss Pinky?” I asked curiously because it didn’t escape me that this girl had a high nose bridge and if she wasn’t of foreign descent but Filipina, she must ingest a ton of glutathione every month to be THIS fair-skinned.
“I am Eurasian, sir. My mother is from Mabalacat, Pampanga but my dad is from Naples, Italy!” the girl said.
“Uh-huh... so you’re aware that ‘maglia rosa’ is Italian for ‘pink jersey’ right?”
“Yes, sir! That’s why pink is my favorite color—”
“Riiight. Who would have guessed? But it’s totally you. I can’t imagine how Leni Robredo lost looking like you do….so, Miss Pinky, Article II, Section1, codal and summary, go!”
“Yes, sir. ‘The Philippines is a democratic and republican State. Sovereignty resides in the people and all government authority emanates from them.’ This phrase is all that remains of that defining concept that was once found in earlier Philippine constitutions prescribing a government ‘of the people, by the people and for the people.’ They took out that beautiful phrase for being too vague and put in this more instructive specification of how our government and society must be structured,” said the girl in pink.
“That’s really impressive, young lady,” I acknowledged, “Now give me at least 5 characteristics of our political system that obey that constitutional concept.”
“Sir, oh, uh…our president is elected directly by all voters; our government is divided into three independent branches; there is no irrepealable law; there are term limits for all elective positions and we strictly follow the rule of one-man-one-vote.”
“Very good. You may take your seat,” I excused the girl, while I held up a forefinger to signal that her performance was worth a “One.” Her classmates were impressed, although I imagine the gentlemen must be a bit disappointed. A looker like that with brains to boot makes her that much more “unattainable.”
“You’ve always been told that we practically copied our political system from America. I will tell you now, class, that’s a little bit of fake news, too. We never had systemic slavery like America did and for as long as we have been holding elections, we have always allowed everyone of voting age to cast a ballot—men, women, rich or poor. In America, women couldn’t even vote until 1920, and as late as the 1960s American negroes were still treated under Article I, Section 2 of THEIR constitution as either two-fifths or three-fifths a person,” some of my students widened their eyes, realizing some of the things I said for the first time.
“Now I included in your case readings one American case to help you appreciate YOUR consitution better, did anyone here bother to read the Dred Scott case?”
Again, only Miss Pinky Maglia Rosa raised her hand and I thought, “this girl is going to stay single the rest of her life!”
“Well, alright, Miss Pinky, tell us about that milestone case,” I turned the floor over to her.
“Sir, Dred Scott was an American freed slave who moved to a state that disallowed slavery. That gave him an opportunity to go to the Supreme Court to challenge the rule that blacks were not citizens and are not allowed to vote—”
“What did he base his challenge on?” I tried to help her along, which she apparently did not need.
“He anchored his cause of action on the Declaration of Independence that said America was dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal with inalienable rights, the most important of which was the right to be represented.”
“Continue, please.”
“Since that time America has struggled for a formula for representing blacks in their populations, because there were southern states with so many slaves that proportionally those states should have more electoral districts than the northern states that did not allow slavery. To address that imbalance, southern slaves were computed as two-fifths of the white populations in their states, while northern slaves were calculated as three-fifths of their state’s white count correspondingly.”
“So you’re saying only two-fifths or three-fifths of these blacks could vote in America back in the day?” I guided the discussion along.
“No, sir. None of these blacks could vote. Those formulas were only for the purpose of apportioning seats in the electoral districting system. Otherwise, only whites could vote or run for office, until the equal voting rights movements of the 1950s to the 1960s finally corrected that.”
“And in contrast, talk briefly about our history of elections here in the Philppines, Miss Pinky.”
“Yes, sir. We held our first legislative elections for the Malolos Congress that held session from June 23 to September 10, 1898 to pave the way for the general election of our first president of the republic, Emilio Aguinaldo in 1899.”
“And how did those elections go, Miss Pinky?”
“They went smoothly, sir. We have always implemented one-man-one-vote because we had no slavery and so we did not have any economic test for voters,” Miss Maglia Rosa said.
“Did you hear that, class? We have never discriminated against any economic class when it comes to suffrage,” I interjected, “and there was only one thing that we copied from the Americans when it comes to voting, and do you know what that is, Miss Pinky?”
“Ahhh ..is it the fact that we also did not allow women to vote until 1937, sir?”
“Exactly. But that only represents a 37-year lag from 1900—just exactly one generation. Whereas from 1787 to 1920, it took the Americans 133 years—six to seven generations—to make that correction. We Filipinos are just THAT much more MATURE than the whole of American political society, suffrage-wise, and yet here we are looking up to the American model in designing our own democracy…” I let my voice trail off.
My Omega Class fell silent. I let it sink in, for a while before saying, “so how could we go from ‘one-man-one-vote’ to ‘one-vote-one-bought’ within just YOUR generation, huh, people?”
My class of millennials looked forlorn. I didn’t mean for it to, but it looked like this evening’s lecture shocked many of them into fully realizing just how absolutely precious it is—this RIGHT TO VOTE in a democratic and republican State. So although my own generation is too far gone, I am hopeful that these, my young millennial zombies, would never ever partake in vote buying.
“Now, when you study your constitution, class, you must read it the same way you read your bible—NOT sequentially. Instead, you must have the discipline of jumping between provisions in different parts and discovering for yourself new relationships among these provisions. So, Miss Pinky, you’ve been doing exceptionally well. So drive this thing home now, find me a related provision that will really cement that concept of republicanism we just dissected.”
“Uh…I would go with Article V, Section 1, sir, but just an excerpt of it?”
“SAY IT!”
“Suffrage may be exercised by all citizens of the Philippines not otherwise disqualified by law….No literacy, property, or other substantive requirement shall be imposed on the exercise of suffrage,” Miss Pinky recited from memory, “that’s the most explicit definition of universal suffrage in all of modern law throughout the entire global legal community right now, sir.”
“Thank you, Miss Pinky. There you go, class. Your classmate has set the recitation bar very high this early in the semester. And I’m not beneath some platitudes here, so I want to commend her for giving it just that little bit of extra effort in her reading of the cases I assigned.”
Something strange happened next. Her classmates stood up and gave their classmate Miss Pinky Maglia Rosa a standing ovation!
That has never happened in my class before. Ever.*
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