At some point during the Iglesia Ni Cristo rally, it felt like we were watching a particularly lurid family scene where skeletons kept being pulled out of the closet without recourse and without remorse.

Senator Imee Marcos revealed some supposed secrets clearly meant to discredit her own brother, the President, his family and his friends, some of them already dead.

Not a few Filipinos reacted less about what she actually said, but more on the fact that it was blared in public amid a raging storm of controversy involving billions of pesos lost from the national budget. Motive? The answer is nothing new.

All this, in fact, is nothing new. Drug use? A never-ending story — we had our fill of the topic during the Duterte presidency. Bombshells made in public? The internet is full of them, and sometimes even Senate investigations. Corruption? We have lived with it since the first Marcos sat in the Palace, though we thought we had seen the beginning of its end when the family was exiled to Hawaii.

It is a hard truth to face, not just for the Marcos family that now sits in power anew, but for the Filipino people whose ill fate it seems is to witness scandalous allegations of greed once more — and with it, in this latest iteration, all the vile things one can think of. Hate, greed, desperation.

Yet Imee’s revelations did not fan the flames of public rage as she may have expected; rather, they left a bad taste in the mouth — a foul taste that comes from seeing a family so intent on their selfish power-grabbing moves that they have no qualms about destroying each other.

Sandro’s Tita Imee, indeed, did something so unacceptable to the Filipino: betray your own family. The Ilocos Norte 1st District representative may have been defending his parents and himself from the accusations thrown out by his own aunt, but his words leave us with the thought of betrayal, and it is the betrayal of the Filipino people.

Imee was intent on destroying, not just her credibility but also her family ties, or whatever was left of it. It was not, Sandro added, “asal ng isang tunay na kapatid (not the behavior of a real sibling),” which, again, sprouted another web of speculations that resurrected the name of another dead personality, a former Manila mayor with alleged ties to the Marcos siblings’ mom, Imelda.

This family history is not something we want to wallow in at this point. What we want is something to be done about the cases unearthed from the 2025 national budget, and what we want is change.

This high-profile spat that began with one Duterte spawn in between, like a toxic sandwich, is unfortunate. But Tita Imee stirring the pot, perhaps to speed up the proceedings, only makes it all worse.

The whole country is reeling from the enormity of the corruption, not feeling Christmas at all but feeling shamed by this dark blot in our culture, and here we have two of the most powerful families wrangling over who should get the best seat in the house.