Thoughts While Taking Care of my Dad at a Public Hospital

Private versus public. Rich versus poor. Privileged versus the disadvantaged.

Somehow in the course of my strange and dysfunctional life I have experienced both sides of the coin. Thus I am either blessed or cursed with the clarity of reality of each side.

Along the way I also gained ever deeper realizations on the nature of my local culture. Whatever culture we have left after more than 300 years of colonization. The colonization still continues in countless ways. And somehow only the shallow and the surface stick and multiply while the essential useful values are perpetually lost in translation. We have become shells of what we could be, of what we could have been.

Our actions and our words are always in conflict. The economy makes words dirt cheap and the cost for actual progress prohibitive. Politics have become a repetitive teleserye with predictable plots that we all still expect to end differently perhaps in a more happily ever after way while we continue to award roles to those who have missed on all the criteria to genuinely perform.

Resilience have become a trick skill. The more resilient we are, the more we grit our teeth to bear through every challenge, the more it is assumed that, well, we can bear just a little bit more. Resilience is a national virtue. We are so strong. We are so brave. We are so alone when we suffer.

The EDSA revolution was a one time thing. Nothing else has ever bound the people together ever again since then. Instead we continued to break, to fragment, to fall apart into even littler pieces that even we couldn’t put ourselves back together if we wanted to. So much discord sowed. The educational system failing us ever more every year, churning out adults who cannot comprehend what they read what more critical thinking?

So emotion leads over reason because reason has been hobbled by intelligence stunted through the supposedly formative years of public school. Malnutrition and mal-education dominated. There are supposed to be rules but the rules were either too brittle or too soft and either way they just added a layer of pretend-care for the welfare of students. Plans and promises would occasionally rise up out of the typical noise of news and then nothing more.

How can we even begin to ascend Maslow's hierarchy of needs when we are mired at the bottom which is a quicksand that grows only deeper.

We have the natural resources to cultivate nourishing food to literally feed every single person in the country but instead we multiply malls and casino resorts. Our farmers throw away their harvest because of failed logistics infrastructure and then in the cities we have to pay a fortune for a kilo of onions.

Public healthcare delivers like lottery. And before that there is so much pain, trouble, inconvenience, inconsideration, and the assumption that beggars can't be choosers and that the beggars would never dare complain.

So in a public hospital where nurses are scarce and doctors juggle so much that treating patients have become almost perfunctory tasks and they have grown into the habit of withholding their names so they cannot be easily remembered or quoted and therefore blamed for anything that falls between the hospital beds, the path to wellness is a path of humility and patience and faith. We try to find the good amidst the inadequacy, the lack in almost everything, the very basics missing or broken -- we find the good in community and commiserations. We step up to make up and cover for the gaps. We stretch our already stretched-thin selves to take on even more, to make space for others, because we understand what it's like.

And this, these things, the people on the other side of the economic and political spectrum would never ever understand nor even begin to imagine. They continue to build and grow their businesses at our expense. Ever increasing the bare minimum of what is supposed to be a good-enough life. Appealing to emotions, changing definitions and feeding new ideals, creating discontent and doubt to win the vote of every hard-earned peso.

Profit versus public good versus planet. The formula is not so simple anymore. Something will have to give. Or something will have to change. I vote for change.