A Southern Voices Reflection After Yesterday’s Protest

Yesterday, everything felt loud against the streets. The chants. The anger that hasn’t gone anywhere in years. The same faces showing up for the same reasons. Holding the same grief in new cardboard signs.

And it’s honestly exhausting.

It’s tiring to keep walking under the sun for a government that never walks back to us. Tiring to keep shouting at buildings that don’t answer. Tiring to watch scandals rise and fade while the same names remain untouched. Tiring to realize that corruption in this country doesn’t even bother to hide anymore; it just gets better lighting in the news.

You go home sore. Your throat hurts. Your feed fills up with photos, speeches, and drone shots. Then, by night, the city settles back into its old shape. And the question stays burning in your chest:

Was any of this enough?

Sometimes it feels like protests only make power more stubborn. Like every chant makes it dig its heels deeper. Like anger, when it doesn’t turn into something else, only teaches the system how loud it has to ignore us.

And yet, we still come back. We still show up. We still gather anyway.

Because what else do you do when your country keeps breaking your heart?

Somewhere between rage and walking home, between sweat and silence, a different feeling begins to show up. Not as loud. Not as sharp. But heavier in a slow way.

The feeling that maybe we’re not just mad at the government. Maybe we’re also tired of a life that keeps telling us this is the only way things can be.

And this is the part we don’t always say out loud. Sometimes we’re not just asking for change. Sometimes, we’re quietly asking for a different world.

You hear it when people start using words like “transition,” like “new systems,” like “people’s councils.” Big words. Beautiful words. Dangerous words, too. Because once you start saying them, you can’t unthink them.

But the truth is: a different world doesn’t begin as a structure. It begins as a question.

So instead of pretending we have answers, we want to sit with the questions. The ones that arrive after the rally. When the street is quiet again. When you finally get to take off your shoes.

Like:

• If we actually succeeded in removing corrupt leaders tomorrow, what kind of country would we wake up to the day after, and who would get to shape it?

• When we say “People’s Council,” whose voices do we already hear… and whose are still nowhere near the table?

• How do we make sure a future council doesn’t become just another small room where a few people speak for millions?

• Is democracy only what happens during rallies… or is it also what happens after, in barangays, kitchens, classrooms, and online conversations like this one?

• What would it take for protest networks to slowly become community networks?

• Are we only imagining new leaders… or are we brave enough to imagine new ways of living with one another?

• If millions are ready to march, are we also ready to listen — especially to those who’ve never been invited into any “movement” before?

• Should calls for change also be calls to organize where we live, not just wherever the microphones are?

• If shouting at power only makes it harder and colder, what kind of pressure actually softens society instead of provoking repression?

• And what if the real alternative to corruption isn’t just replacing a government… but becoming the kind of people who know how to take care of each other without waiting for permission?

  
  

We ask these not to weaken any movement, but to deepen it.

Because anger alone burns fast, but relationships burn longer.

And as a publishing house, this is where we quietly stand. Not behind a podium, but among stories. Among voices that don’t often get invited into national conversations. Among memories the news cycle forgets too quickly.

We publish not because we think books will save the world, but because we’ve seen how they save people’s sense of it. They slow things down. They remind us that history is not just written by winners, but by ordinary people who refuse to disappear quietly.

And maybe that’s the work now. Not just to demand something better, but to learn how to practice it in small, stubborn, everyday ways.

Maybe the future doesn’t begin with a council, or a congress, or another election poster. Maybe it begins in conversations that don’t trend, in communities that choose to stay human, in people who are tired but still honest enough to hope.

We don’t end this with certainty. We sit with it unfinished.

Because maybe the most radical thing right now is not a solution, but staying long enough in the questions to let them change us before we change anything else.