One of our favorite medical technologists has left the country to work where there’s dignity, decent pay and better prospects for career development. It was quite expected, as his every “day in the life” episode seemed to point overseas, a direction where millions have gone, and gave him no hope here.

In more posts that we could possibly manage with proper mental wellness, we see an endless stream of calls for help for their family members’ hospitalization. QR codes are passed around, hoping that bills could be paid and medicines bought. In one case, a private hospital gave a dutiful son an ultimatum: his mother may not survive unless he buys all her daily medicines from the hospital dispensary and at prices reaching ₱10,000 a day.

How they ended up in a private hospital is not difficult to imagine in a world where public hospitals are always full. We produce the world’s best doctors, nurses and other health workers. But we are caught in the precarious space between the differences in cost, expense and profit, and between private and public.

Across Metro Manila, customers absolutely hate seeing and reading their electric power bills. They’re riddled by onerous rates, charges and taxes. Even systems losses are charged against them by companies. Worse, the government charges those systems losses with EVAT.

Only time will tell if the current president and the current Congress would undo the terrible mistakes of past presidents and past Congresses in how customers are billed for electricity.

To the surprise of many, the government has announced the allotment of an area bigger than Mandaluyong and three times bigger than San Juan for an “international project.” Also: 65 million to 130 million liters of water per day. 3 gigawatts of electricity. That’s water for 600,000 households, and power that could only come from three coal power plants or a still inexistent nuclear facility, in a province and region that desperately needs adequate water and power. The project is not for any bold step to national industrialization. It is for an American-led artificial intelligence project at a global scale. Fine details have not been shared with the surprised public, with various officials claiming jobs

For the past couple of years, the government has unveiled annual budgets in the trillions of pesos. (To pay for the bill, trillions are borrowed in the name of Filipinos yet to be born and indirect taxes of all sorts are imposed.) Both ordinary people as well as conscientious economists and professionals see funds for possibly erasing backlogs in infrastructure for health, education, housing and transportation. But the budgets go elsewhere. We are soon marking the first year anniversary of the flood control scam, where the loot makes big crooks of the past look like petty thieves today. Whether you blame run-away inflation or more brazen corruption for the historic corrupted amounts, you would still be correct.

Right in the nation’s capital, decades-old trees are cut where they once provided much-needed shade and flood control at an avenue named after a president. (Props to senior high school students for going out of their way and going to the Supreme Court to seek redress.)

Metro Manila and Metro Davao went under flood waters just recently, perhaps to remind us of the unresolved problems of both flood control and the flood control scams.

A few kilometers away from Quirino Avenue, the impeachment court hears the case against the Vice President.

This week, a court stopped a ₱85 wage increase for Metro Manila minimum-wage workers. Meanwhile, there’s no stopping the ₱26.5-billion net income for the country’s biggest power distributor.

These are snapshots of the national situation. For many, the dominant feelings are anger, cynicism, hopelessness, and even flight. There’s an opportunity and a crying need for counterpoints or a counterpoint. Something that would unite the nation, and not divide it further along lines of tribe, region, religion, language or shifting loyalties to traditional politicians and dynasties. The latter cannot possibly be the solution. It brought us to where we are now.

The consolation is that the medtech still looks back at the Philippines. The senior high school students have gone to court. The runners and workers are demanding infrastructure and shade. And so on. Somewhere, somehow, there’s hope that overseas Filipinos could come back to a better country. How and for whom we would all make it better, that’s where and why the counterpoint is needed.