A part of me is laughing at this day, April Fools, we call it, because it feels like we have been living the first of April for quite some time now.

Like Groundhog Day, when you can’t tell a groundhog from a cat-sized rat roaming around Manila sewers. Like a nightmare we do not want to know we are in.

Wake up. Suffer.

Wake up. Revolt.

Wake up. Wait.

Wake up. Forget.

Wake up. Suffer.

Wake up. Revolt

Wake up. Wait.

Wake up. Forget.

And over and over again… because we can’t seem to get to the next step.

Take this fuel oil crisis. Several bus companies will reportedly be sanctioned for increasing their fares. Passengers will be affected, yes. Fuel prices will still keep rising. Yes. Meanwhile, the excise tax is still there like a cockroach that will survive a nuclear holocaust. Will suspending bus companies solve anything?

Are we addressing our problems correctly? Because if not, we are bound to get the same unwanted results over and over.

Sometimes what’s obvious to the naked eye elicits the biggest reactions, but if one only takes a moment to delve deeper, it may become clear that a problem is just a small, solvable matter.

There would be no need for histrionics, or the crumbling of morale.

When you approach a problem, you just don’t tackle the symptoms. You have to get to the root of the matter or brace yourself for relapses.

Some call it “enduring systemic patterns.” The deja vu we feel every time a scandal erupts? It’s because we have seen it all before. The rot may smell different each time, but a stench is still a stench.

Culture comes straight from the top, whether we are talking nation, corporate, community, or family. How we do things, how we react to crises, how we handle a problem, and how we treat each other — that is how a culture is built.

Over time, Filipino culture has emerged as a strongly international one, with the reality that we are an archipelago, open to many influences, and our people are almost everywhere now — the Filipino diaspora numbering over 10 million living and working across more than 200 countries and territories as of 2026.

Families have struggled to survive as corruption slowly began to eat into our dignity. What we have tolerated, endured, forgiven, and forgotten has gotten us exactly where we are, inching along, dragging the chains of our own making.

And still we rant about the wrong things, create issues out of an obsession with a desired outcome, failing to fix the underlying systems or processes that caused the problem in the first place.

Then we wonder: how did we end up having a system that has trapped us in an endless cycle of misery? We are a rich nation, are we not? Our people are good, talented, and hardworking, are they not? We have had many chances to do a reset. What happened?

Maybe there is no need to ask who the fool is.