"After all the Scandals, Expect Chaos, and Expect this will Happen"
Observers noted the faces first. They were not seasoned cadres, members of civil society, nor college activists with banners. They were the urban poor: thin, wiry teens, street kids, displaced families’ sons and daughters. They were angry — furious — shaking with a rage older than they were. Some shouted slogans for Duterte. Some cursed Marcos Jr. But it hardly mattered. The common denominator was rage at a system that lets the powerful loot, kill by negligence, and hide behind bodyguards, while the poor are beaten, arrested, and jailed for lesser crimes.
Witnesses saw the pattern: the same ferocity that rises when shanties are torn down and families driven to sidewalks, the same desperation that appears when police round up children as part of a “clean-up.” Even as the truncheons rose, even as they were chased and slammed to the ground, the young fought back.
To older activists, the scene was a ghost of decades past — the fire of the First Quarter Storm in 1970, minus the discipline and direction once provided by organized progressive groups. In the 60s and 70s, youth movements were structured; now the anger is raw, scattered, improvised. These young protesters are not reading manifestos. They are living them.
The episode also functioned as a stark message to the political class. The rage of the poor has been simmering for decades, under a crust of patronage and neglect. Corrupt politicians, dynastic clans, and their technocratic partners may dismiss the unrest as noise or provocation. But the facts stand: their policies and their theft have bred a generation with nothing to lose. This is what decades of broken promises and economic betrayal look like in human form.
Online, elitist remarks condemned the young protesters as criminals. Some claimed they were “plants” meant to incite violence. These remain theories, not facts. What is certain is that their anger did not come from nowhere. It germinated in jobless homes, underfunded classrooms, and flooded streets where public money disappears into pork and shadow budgets.
Their methods may differ from those of older movements, but their anger mirrors the same broken system their elders once tried to change. And even amid chaos, new symbols emerged: black ski masks, Straw Hat Pirate flags from One Piece, gestures borrowed from European antifascist street theater. It was a strange collage — anime bravado, urban survival, and political desperation — but also the first draft of a new language of rebellion.
Observers noted that what these youth lack is not courage but compass. They have energy but not infrastructure, rage but not roadmaps. Without guidance, their power risks being crushed, co-opted, or left to burn itself out. With guidance, it could evolve into a movement capable of challenging entrenched corruption and dynastic rule.
In the end, solidarity requires more than slogans. It demands standing with the angry and the dispossessed, even when their tactics make the middle class uncomfortable. It means recognizing that this generation’s fury springs from the same injustices older activists once faced. And it means offering direction before that fury either collapses or erupts into something no one can control.
September 21 was not just a clash; it was a signal flare. Ignore it, and the anger will deepen. Mock it, and it will harden. Meet it with sincerity, guidance, and solidarity, and it might become the force that finally tips a corrupt order into reform.
The streets have spoken — ragged, masked, furious. They have said, in a language older than laws and newer than hashtags: expect chaos. Expect it to happen. And expect that, with courage and clarity, chaos can be transformed into change.