This weekend, I went home to Quezon to fulfill a personal resolution: I must never miss an opportunity to vote. The national midterm election just passed, but I’m headed to polls once again for this year's regular student council elections.
For the past few weeks, I witnessed hopeful leaders' campaigns and their contrasting stances in societal and university issues. Perhaps what struck me most, besides activist and current political prisoner Amanda Echanis' candidacy, is what seems to be a clash of the modern with the traditional, evinced in the presence of a new alliance in the form of the Laban Kabataan coalition, colliding with the slate of a redeveloping UP ALYANSA.
However, I've grown to be more vigilant of our student leaders, especially after issues of accountability that continue to mire the student council in controversy. Cases of sexual harassment and domestic abuse prevail in student movements, and their mismanagement of such furthers their dysfunction and adds fuel to the studentry's distrust. This manifests in the abundance of abstention in polls, which in turn leads to an understaffed council.
For a supposed bastion of activism and political consciousness, UP Diliman's campus politics remain dismally suboptimal. While I have read various reports and posts on social media regarding dwindling student participation even before my freshman year, a small part of me had hoped it would be different this time around. But then I was welcomed into an underrepresented student body, in the form of a mostly-vacant university student council, and makeshift local ones appointed from volunteers.
In the midst of looming issues that threaten student welfare, there must be a conscious effort from the student body to resuscitate the drive to participate in campus concerns. Our current stagnation ensues in the community's continued plights incited by both local and national forces, and this predicament can only be resolved once we recognize the cruciality of an invigorated studentry by which we can all actively play a part in.
Our prospective student leaders need to be the frontliners in fostering an environment where constituents are ensured that their calls are heard and their needs are met, through the concretization of their proposed action plans and increasing their visibility on-ground. While we acknowledge the lapses in our current disposition and our changing demographic notwithstanding, we have no choice but to parry on. It is through collective efforts we can champion our interests of dismantling destructive cycles that play in our society, making way for better, more functional systems to grow. ●
