"When the streets are writing their own statements"
The observers in the crowd notice the same thing: these are not campus activists in neat uniforms, nor professional agitators rehearsing chants. They are street kids, informal settlers, the working poor, and the newly jobless. Their slogans are scattered — mostly foul mouthed statements against the corrupt — but the unity is unmistakable: fury at a system where the powerful are untouchable and the poor are disposable.
Their rage did not arrive like a storm; it brewed like rot in a closed room. In families without work. In schools without teachers. In alleys where the water rises higher every monsoon while billions are siphoned into pork. When the police sweep children off the streets for “clean-up,” when bulldozers crush shanties to clear land for condos, the lesson is burned into memory: fight or be erased.
A social myth to be?
Veterans of past movements watch and whisper from the edges of the crowd. They recognize the posture, the clenched fists, the makeshift shields. It is the echo of the First Quarter Storm without its discipline; the ghost of barricades without the cadres. In the 1970s there were structures — parties, fronts, networks, mentors who channeled rage into strategy. Now the structure is gone, but the rage has returned, naked and unmediated. People should also remember some even born after EDSA or even lived during the May 01 riots led by former supporters of Joseph Estrada- and that rage, although raw, shows the discontent hidden underneath the masks.
Georges Sorel once argued that social myths are more potent than any policy paper, that great uprisings are not born from platforms but from images so vivid they seize the imagination and drive people to act. “Myth,” he wrote, “is not a description of things but an expression of a determination to act.” And here, in these uncoordinated young protesters, that principle is alive in its rawest form. They have no manifestos to wave, no ideological catechism to chant — but they have the living myth of their own dispossession, repeated daily in hunger, in eviction, in humiliation at checkpoints.
These youth possess something harder and sharper than an official narrative. They carry necessity like a banner. Their weapon is hunger, their engine humiliation. They are the children of demolished shantytowns, of vanished jobs, of classrooms without books. They are myth in motion, even if they do not name it as such. The sight of them rushing police lines with nothing but stones and plastic shields is itself a mythic image, echoing uprisings from Manila to Marseille, from the barricades of Paris to the streets of Tondo.
The older generation knows this energy, but they also know its dangers. Without direction, myth can scatter into riots, burnout, or co-optation. With direction, it can topple regimes. In the absence of formal organization, these youth have turned to symbols — black ski masks, antifascist tactics, Straw Hat Pirate flags from "One Piece" — not as decoration but as placeholders for the myths they have yet to forge. Like Sorel warned, it is precisely in such improvised images that the seed of collective action can take root.
Expect them to be accused
Online, the commentary splits. Some accuse these folks of being planted agitators. Some call them criminals. Others just sneer. All of it misses the fact that the anger is real, not rented. It has been earned over decades of plunder and betrayal. These young people are not anomalies; they are the inevitable by-product of a system that criminalizes poverty while rewarding theft by the bigwigs. To be frank, this write-up is for those who dismiss them. For those who roll their eyes at the barricades and broken glass. For those who sneer from air-conditioned cars, who share memes and think it counts as analysis. For those who call them names.
They’re called gangsters — as if being in a gang makes their grievances less real. But what is a gang to a boy who grew up watching his father beaten by enforcers of an absentee landlord? What is a gang to a girl whose home was bulldozed before sunrise with no relocation, no compensation, only the taste of dust and tear gas? When a community lives under constant state violence, gentrification, and poverty, that same violence becomes their grammar, their weapon, their survival code. The gang is not glamour. It’s geography. It’s a line drawn against erasure.
They’re called squatters — as if migration and land-grabbing in the countryside don’t force the poor into the city. As if eviction from ancestral land, collapsing farm prices, and drought caused by mismanaged irrigation do not push people to ride the bus to Manila with nothing but a plastic bag of clothes and a list of relatives who might take them in. Communities grow on the only land left — railways, creeksides, reclaimed ports, rooftops. And when the state clears them with police and hired goons, calling it development, it is not progress. It’s aggression by another name, backed by real estate money, rolled out under banners of “renewal” and “modernization.” They are not illegal settlers. They are displaced citizens.
They’re called uneducated — as if fluency in policy jargon is the only valid form of resistance. Politics and social studies stripped from schools. Teachers underpaid, classrooms overcrowded, entire generations taught to memorize without question. Yet these kids have learned politics from the barricade, the checkpoint, the hunger line. Their textbook is the demolition notice taped to their door. Their lectures come from the fire hoses and the shields. Their graduation is surviving another eviction. Unlike those who learned politics in seminar rooms, they have no safety net of NGOs or tenured professors. They are living the syllabus in real time.
They’re called addicts — as if coping through substances erases systemic neglect. But look closer: the same police who crack down on them often run the trade in these neighborhoods. The same politicians who condemn them on the floor of Congress protect the syndicates at budget hearings. When the state strips a person of work, home, and dignity, substances become anesthesia, a pause button from a life of constant shock. This is not an excuse; it’s an indictment of the system.
Those who fight corruption but condemn these kids’ fury should revisit what corruption does at street level. Corruption is not just an envelope under a table. It’s a busted drainage project that floods their homes. It’s a ghost relocation site that never materializes. It’s a health clinic without medicine, a scholarship fund swallowed by a district office. Listen first. Learn. Then talk about tactics. This isn’t a plea for charity. This isn’t an excuse for every stone thrown. It’s a demand for clarity. Before calling them gangsters, squatters, uneducated, addicts — remember who built the conditions that made the barricade their only microphone.
If one wants less chaos, build less desperation. If one wants less fury, build less injustice. If one wants less confrontation, build more dignity. Because until then, the streets will remain their classroom, their courtroom, and their only stage. The ruling class and its apologists misread this at their peril. These young fighters are not the product of seminars or soft launches; they are forged in eviction zones, detention centers, and hunger lines. They have learned to run, regroup, and charge. The truncheon blows only teach them to duck faster, to scatter smarter, to come back harder.
Expect them to fight back
And if they ever gain direction — if a movement arises to guide rather than exploit them — then Manila’s glittering towers will not be tall enough to hide behind, and its marble lobbies will not be thick enough to muffle the sound of their footsteps. The rage now seen as incoherent will become a single voice. The scattered stones will become a hammer. Sorel also wrote that “violence can awaken the deepest energies of a people when legality has been corrupted beyond redemption.” These youth are the proof of that warning. They are not the end of the story; they are its opening chapter. Ignore them and the next chapter will be written not with slogans but with something far heavier.
Nowadays, solidarity is no longer a slogan. It is a necessity. To stand with these youth is not to endorse every tactic but to recognize their humanity and their claim to a future. It is to see that their battle is not just with police lines but with the entire architecture of dynastic privilege, crony capitalism, and civic neglect.
Every baton strike, every arrest, every meme ridiculing them is another strike of the hammer. Sparks don’t disappear; they accumulate. And as Sorel warned, when myth and rage converge, the streets become the forge of history. This is the first draft of a new struggle. The poor are teaching themselves to fight back in the only language left to them. Today they throw stones. Tomorrow — if nothing changes — they will throw something harder. The streets are writing their own manifesto now. The only question is who will read it, and who will pretend it’s not there until it’s too late.
Again, as said in the earlier writeup, "Expect chaos. Expect it to happen." No amount of "the need for a peaceful setting" can avert the growing anger like what happened, and expect that if the powerful continue to ignore it, that chaos will no longer be a warning but a beginning.