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While that commotion was happening, another friend was calling me up. Along with those two calls, my phone kept on vibrating from an influx of text messages and notifications that were coming in so fast I had to put the phone down.

About just 2 minutes after that call, I had over 20-something text messages and I kept receiving even more notifications from Facebook, Viber, and Twitter. There was so much coming in that I had to turn my phone off for a while just to save the battery because I still had a dinner to attend.

When I finally made it home, I was ready to check that photo of me you used in your presentation and see the fuss that came with it. Once I got my laptop running, and in the span of a few hours of dinner, I had never seen so many notifications in my life.

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Growing up in this day and age, I experience first-hand the rampancy of hearing that “there’s no hope for this country.” Yet, there I was on a random Monday night, working on a presentation, minding my own business, and receiving a flurry of messages from several of my friends – all during the actual airing time of the SONA.

When I got home that night, I even went through the posts and noticed timestamps from all the notifications. I realized they were also all during the time you were speaking.

In the midst of a widespread culture of hate in this country, I am reminded that my generation – the millennial generation, does care about the welfare of the Philippines. In the midst of all the attention a single photo has garnered, I am reminded of the moving words Cardinal Tagle shared back in 2013 during my graduation.

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A Millennial’s promise

As a part of the next generation that has on its shoulders the name of the Philippines in the years to come, I want to let you know that one thing we’re already very good at is speaking out. We’re a very vocal generation.

Some may take this to mean we’re a very vain generation, given our social media pages filled with photos and statuses. Maybe that’s true for some cases – but if you turn toward the bigger picture, we show you a generation of people no longer scared to express an opinion, no matter how small.

We now we have voices, and we now know we have the means to make them louder. We now have the means to be heard.

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Most importantly, let’s learn to stop saying there’s no hope for this Philippines and start seeing what’s right in front of all of us: our people – the genuine hope for this country’s progress.

I’ve seen that hope countless times, Mr President, and it has the power to change things and move more people. It’s the same hope I see in faces on the streets and faces in profile pictures. It’s the same hope that tells me that our progress as a country isn’t a delusion, but rather a result of definitive action from all of us.

So long as that hope exists in our people, I will always be more than willing to carry bottles of water under the rain for it – because that’s exactly what this country needs: people to hope, and people to act on it.

Thank you very much, President Noy.


Serge Gabriel is a psychology graduate of the Ateneo de Manila University. He recently qualified for a scholarship to take his Master’s in Philosophy at Gonzaga University in Washington. He is currently a part-time lecturer at the Ateneo, a poet and spoken word artist under Words Anonymous, and is training to finish his first sprint triathlon by the end of the year.

http://www.rappler.com/

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