Soon They’ll Say: Forget Change, Be Young, Be Innocent

Soon They’ll Say: Forget Change, Be Young, Be Innocent 

By Kat Ulrike

In these latter days, when the guardians of the established order sense the rising pulse of discontent among the young, they offer counsel wrapped in the measured tones of paternal prudence. “To the youth,” they declare, “get mad. Protest. Fight for your rights. That is democracy. That is legal.” Yet the admonition invariably carries its stern reservation: the moment the young take up the gun and join an armed formation, they pass from the estate of citizen into that of combatant. They forfeit the protections of law and expose themselves to the full severity of RA 11479 and the Revised Penal Code. Change wrought through statute, according to them, preserves life. Change pursued through bullets consumes it. "Let not fellow Filipinos become the foe upon your chosen battlefield" as they say as to defend the status quo wrapped in the promise of the need for reform and change. "Suffer not the recruiters to turn your idealism into an instrument of destruction."

But beneath this seemingly balanced rhetoric lies a deeper and more insistent direction, one that grows clearer with each wave of unrest. The message, once its polite veneer is stripped away, edges steadily toward this: Soon they will say—"forget change altogether. Be young. Be innocent. Enjoy the permitted pleasures and fleeting freedoms of youth. Do not burden yourselves with the heavy architecture of power, injustice, and systemic transformation. Leave such grave matters to your elders, who have learned the wisdom of accommodation and the limits of what is possible." The progression is familiar and almost mechanical. First comes permission for contained protest. Then follows the warning against crossing into armed resistance- even unarmed ones. Finally arrives the quiet summons to abandon the pursuit of fundamental change and retreat into a cultivated, harmless innocence. 

It is a counsel as ancient as power itself, yet renewed in every generation of challenge. From positions of comfort and security, it is easy—almost costless—to condemn the rebel who lifts the rifle. One may discourse gravely upon the loss of legal safeguards under anti-terror legislation without ever descending into the conditions of poverty, landlessness, dynastic capture, and institutional decay that drive some among the young toward the uncertain path of the hills. In our time, the very idea of armed struggle is too often reduced to the flat category of “terrorism.” This simplification serves the convenience of narrative. It dismisses decades of peace negotiations between the government and the National Democratic Front—talks that at times produced agreements acknowledging profound socio-economic roots: ancient grievances of landlessness, the grinding poverty of the countryside, the capture of institutions by entrenched families, and resentments reaching back through martial law and earlier peasant risings. If every bearing of arms is forthwith branded terrorism, of what genuine use then are such negotiations? Why deliberate upon agrarian reform and political restructuring if the mere fact of prior rebellion strips away all context and nuance? 

That a faction should rise in arms against the prevailing order does not, of itself, constitute terrorism in the classical sense. Many movements now remembered as liberatory once included armed components precisely when lawful avenues appeared blocked or illusory. Terrorism directs violence chiefly against the innocent to sow widespread fear. Armed rebellion, however terrible its toll, often conceives itself as contesting the coercive machinery of the state amid conditions of deep asymmetry. To equate the two is to erase the moral and historical space for legitimate political violence in moments of systemic extremity, while conveniently overlooking the quieter structural and procedural violence through which the established order perpetuates itself. 

People inhabit an age of thoroughly asymmetric contest, wherein warfare has escaped the ordered lines and clear frontiers of earlier epochs. All has become irregular—including the domains of information and cognition. Traditional “civilised” warfare presupposed uniformed hosts and defined battlefields. Today, power contends through hybrid instruments: disinformation, economic pressure, legal manoeuvres (“lawfare”), and operations directed upon the mind itself. The state commands superior material force—police, army, courts, and channels of public voice—yet its opponents adapt with the limited weapons available to the weak. Warnings against the weaponisation of youthful idealism carry merit, yet they frequently pass lightly over the capacity of the system itself to weaponise legality, procedural delay, and selective moral outrage in the service of neutralisation. 

Information warfare and the struggle for cognition compound the difficulty. In this epoch, a mere particle of emotionally resonant falsehood—appealing directly to the passions of the street—often outweighs volumes of documented evidence. No matter how scrupulous the investigation or lucid the exposition of causes, a simple query—“Why were they there?”—or the invocation of quo warranto suffices in many quarters to eclipse inconvenient realities. Such rhetorical devices function as instruments in the larger cognitive battle, eroding confidence in institutions, evidence, and shared truth. Narratives that reduce complex insurgencies to undifferentiated terrorism, while portraying every state response as pure defence, operate squarely within this contested terrain. 

There are those who quote Gandhi: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” There are those who quote Zig Ziglar: “Change begins with you, but it doesn’t start until you do!” These maxims are invoked with apparent sincerity by many who claim to recognise the idea of change. Yet in truth, such voices tend to diminish the fuller meaning of change in favour of a narrowed focus upon the self—not the human person embedded in community, history, and moral obligation, but the atomised individual, isolated and tasked solely with personal improvement. By reducing transformation to private self-cultivation, they subtly deflect attention from the structures of power, inequality, and institutional failure that demand collective confrontation. Personal responsibility is real and necessary, but when it is elevated as the sole theatre of change, it becomes a sedative that leaves the larger edifice untouched. 

Those who urge the young to render their anger “constructive rather than destructive” would do well to recall deeper currents of thought that have animated humanity across ages and civilizations. Karl Marx demonstrated how the ruling ideas of an age are largely the ideas of its ruling class. When power itself delineates the permissible limits of protest and brands every fundamental challenge as criminality, it shields its privileges beneath the cloak of impartial law. What presents itself as neutral legality is often the crystallized will of the dominant class, shaped to preserve existing relations of power. The law, in such hands, does not merely regulate conduct; it defines the very boundaries of legitimate grievance. Any demand that strikes at the roots — land reform, dismantling of dynastic control, genuine redistribution of opportunity — is swiftly recast as subversion, sedition, or terrorism. Thus the powerful maintain the appearance of order while insulating themselves from meaningful accountability.

The great sacred traditions of mankind likewise bear witness to a higher standard. The Bible thunders against unjust decrees and the oppression of the vulnerable: “Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed” (Isaiah 10:1-2). It commands the faithful to “learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression” (Isaiah 1:17) and declares that “righteousness and justice are the foundation of [God’s] throne” (Psalm 89:14). The apostles themselves affirmed, “We must obey God rather than men” when earthly authority conflicted with divine command. The Quran repeatedly enjoins justice as a divine imperative: “O you who have believed, be persistently standing firm in justice, witnesses for Allah, even if it be against yourselves or parents and relatives” (Quran 4:135). It condemns oppression in the strongest terms, declaring that Allah does not love the oppressors and that the world itself cannot long endure under zulm (injustice), for “Allah commands justice and excellent conduct” (Quran 16:90). Even the Vedic tradition and broader Eastern philosophies conceive of Dharma not as mechanical obedience to statute but as alignment with a higher moral and cosmic order — the eternal law of truth, duty, righteousness, and harmony that sustains the universe. When rulers and systems depart grievously from this righteousness—sustaining mass deprivation through corruption, exclusion, and entrenched inequality—the obligation to restore equilibrium may transcend the letter of enacted law. In such moments, conscience, informed by transcendent principle, stands in judgment over mere positive law. 

Even the urge to study, to investigate, to seek understanding becomes itself an act of rebellion unless it is carefully confined within the parameters of legality approved by the order. Yet reality has a stubborn way of escaping such parameters. Honest investigation and rigorous study, when pursued without fear or favour, lead inexorably to conclusions that reform is not merely desirable but inevitable. The deeper one probes into the actual conditions of landlessness, corruption, dynastic dominance, and blocked opportunity, the more apparent it becomes that cosmetic adjustments will not suffice. But here arises the further difficulty: is reform itself permitted only within the narrow parameters imposed by the existing order? When change is reduced to superficial measures — token programs, rhetorical concessions, or temporary palliatives — it serves merely as a cosmetic intent meant to appease a growing angry populace, including the youth who stand ready to turn every tool into a weapon when all other avenues appear sealed. 

As Mao Zedong observed with characteristic directness: “To take such an attitude is to seek truth from facts. ‘Facts’ are all the things that exist objectively, ‘truth’ means their internal relations, that is, the laws governing them, and ‘to seek’ means to study. We should proceed from the actual conditions inside and outside the country… and derive from them, as our guide to action, laws that are inherent in them and not imaginary… We must rely not on subjective imagination, not on momentary enthusiasm, not on lifeless books, but on facts that exist objectively.” 

He even further warned against superficial thinking such as "book worship": “You can’t solve a problem? Well, get down and investigate the present facts and its past history! When you have investigated the problem thoroughly, you will know how to solve it. Conclusions invariably come after investigation, and not before. Only a blockhead cudgels his brains on his own, or together with a group, to ‘find a solution’ or ‘evolve an idea’ without making any investigation. It must be stressed that this cannot possibly lead to any effective solution or any good idea.”

Once, Friedrich Engels captured something of the radical edge that disturbs the comfortable in his poetic commentary upon Max Stirner during the time of Die Freien: 

"Look at Stirner, look at him, the peaceful enemy of all constraint.

For the moment, he is still drinking beer,

Soon he will be drinking blood as though it were water.

When others cry savagely “down with the kings”

Stirner immediately supplements “down with the laws also.”

Stirner full of dignity proclaims;

You bend your willpower and you dare to call yourselves free.

You become accustomed to slavery

Down with dogmatism, down with law."

Engels’ lines, sharp with irony, anticipate the discomfort felt by those who today counsel the youth to remain strictly within legal bounds—and who may soon counsel them to abandon the pursuit of change itself. 

Why do they speak in this manner? Are they haunted by the spectres of future Andreas Baaders, Ulrike Meinhofs, and Gudrun Ensslins—those figures of the West German Red Army Faction who, emerging from the student movements of a prosperous yet spiritually restless society, turned toward militant action against what they perceived as a hollow, imperialist order? The Philippines is not West Germany, with its distinct history, culture, and circumstances. Yet the underlying dynamic bears troubling resemblance: when a system blocks meaningful avenues for transformation while breeding frustration among the idealistic young, it may engender conditions that prove disruptive rather than orderly by nature. Everything becomes an option. Those who seek to impose limits upon dissent often strive to diminish the uncomfortable truth that the system itself creates the very conditions it later deems “necessary” to suppress. In such a climate, the book and the pen become the gun itself—tools of critique and mobilisation that the powerful fear no less than armed bands, for ideas, once kindled, possess their own inexorable force. 

In the end, every instrument stands capable of weaponisation, for every tool may be turned to martial purpose. The state itself may transmute peace into “peacefare”—employing negotiations, ceasefires, and dialogues less to address root afflictions than to intimidate, fragment, or delegitimise those who press for profound and systemic alteration, even when such alteration strikes at the foundations of the order. The pen, and in this electronic age the smartphone, may wield force comparable to the rifle, shaping perceptions and marshalling multitudes across the ether. 

Ernst Jünger, the chronicler of storm and steel, understood the magnetic pull that danger and the extraordinary exert upon a generation raised in security. “Grown up in an age of security,” he wrote of his own comrades, “we shared a yearning for danger, for the experience of the extraordinary. We were enraptured by war.” In our own context, such yearning does not always seek conflict for its own sake, but it reveals a profound dissatisfaction with a world that offers only managed dissent and domesticated dreams. 

Oswald Spengler, in his sombre morphology of civilizations, saw late-stage societies as places where “eternal youths” reappear—immature yet fervent, hostile to established forms of state, property, and rank, clinging to theories and badges while the deeper cultural fire dims. In the winter of a civilization, he suggested, instinct and elemental forces reassert themselves against the reign of abstract reason and financial power. The call to “be young and innocent” may thus serve as a sedative precisely when the social order senses its own senescence and fears the disruptive vitality that authentic change demands. 

Genuine maturity does not require the young to surrender their idealism upon securing their first wage. It demands instead that the republic confront why such idealism so frequently collides with the necessities of survival. It requires those who hold authority to treat radical discontent not merely as a security disturbance to be suppressed under anti-terror statutes, but as a symptom of failings that reform through law alone has too often proven insufficient to remedy. 

The youth would do well to guard against both the romanticisation of the gun and the seductive call to cultivated innocence. They should maintain equal vigilance against homilies upon the sanctity of law and democracy issuing from those who preside over, or draw sustenance from, a system that too frequently renders both terms ironic. In this era of cognitive and asymmetric strife, wherein narratives command legitimacy no less than projectiles, the true labour is not to instruct the young to cease being angry, nor to urge them toward a false and convenient innocence. 

It is to confront, with unflinching honesty and without instinctive recourse to criminalisation, the reasons why so many among them still discover such potent cause for anger—and why the established order fears that anger when it refuses to remain merely youthful and contained. 

The path forward cannot rest upon incantations of legality alone, nor upon any glorification of violence. It demands the honest recognition that peace negotiations have persisted precisely because armed struggle, however grievous its cost, has repeatedly compelled attention to grievances that decorous reform has often contrived to evade. It calls for a reformation of the social order so thorough that recourse to bullets loses its desperate appeal—not through the expansive application of terrorism statutes that swallow dissent, but through the concrete delivery of justice, opportunity, and accountability sufficient to render idealism and daily existence no longer mortal antagonists. 

Until that day arrives, the evolving counsel—“get mad, but only legally…" soon, "forget change, be young, be innocent”—will strike many as little more than sophisticated counsel to accept the world as it is, rather than labour to remake it as conscience and necessity demand. History records that when legal avenues harden into instruments of preservation rather than renewal, certain souls will inevitably seek other means. To understand that sombre dynamic, without thereby extenuating its human price, remains the beginning of wiser statesmanship.