294, One’s job
It can be supposed that at one time in his life Jesse Robredo might have done this, spend the better part of a Saturday at the playing field. He had beautiful children who all look as if they are athletic. At least one was a swimmer. This much can be gleaned from the papers. And he might have as any good father would brought the child for the first time to the playing field to compete, or in other words, to do their one particular job in the scheme of the larger game. More often than not, these are usually played inside the context of the larger team.
Children have a great attachment to their primary comfort zones. Were it left entirely up to them, each and every Saturday would be spent at home playing or doing internet or watching television. It is after all the first free day after almost a week of school. To take them out from here just so they might face the “real” world and be better adapted to it is not the easiest job for parents. They too spent a long work-week, and there are easier things to do than spend a Saturday at the ball field. There are newspapers to read, a good book perhaps, certainly a cup of coffee would be nice, and then the comfort of the sofa, which ostensibly is set in front of the television set. History channel would be playing. And yet the job of parent calls for bringing the child, contra gusto, to do what?
Play ball. Compete. Run. Jump. Swim. Attack. Defend. Score. The young child must ask, Why does that make sense?
And so the parent explains. We have no control over what the world is. We can only accept what”s there. Not everything we need to do will be easy. In fact, some can be quite difficult. Worse, we will have to convince ourselves we are happy to do it. And in the end we must make it fun for us. For that is the human condition. Nothing good can be achieved without sacrifice. And yet the irony: It is precisely this sort of sacrifice that makes life meaningful, and ultimately happy. For what can be happier or more joyful than the thought we did our best, win or lose? After all scores are tallied at the end, nothing can be better.
Good parents must have brought Jesse Robredo to the field many times early in life. It seems he led his life well. As a civil servant, he did his job.
We are, of course, well used to hyperbole. We expect it. But Robredo had a particular job to do. It was not an easy job. Given the same post, some traditional politician may have accompanied the work with much pomp and pageantry, much press release and informercials. But until he disappeared in a plane crash, we hardly knew who he was, what he was doing and how well he was doing it.
That he was an honest man, seems a surprise to us who have grown cynical of all things government and political. That he helped the poor the way he did and that they loved him back that way they do seems only added bonus to our surprise. But it is the mere fact that he was a civil servant who did his job well which is enough to justify why we should now feel the loss of him. We can only wonder if anyone else might be able to make up for that from hereon. And we cannot help to ask: Is it a sad measure of all of us that we should honor a man this way for just simply doing his job?
Unfortunately, we are a people who have grown used to being abused by the powerful. This distrust goes one step further. There was much talk in the last elections warning against electing people who were too “well-educated”. And of all who fell under this category the key words to watch out for was “Harvard” and yes, “UP”. Now we can say that with Jesse Robredo, the schools of higher learning have at least redeemed themselves in our esteem.
Of him, we can say much more. And still they would not be enough. Though we know him only after his passing, he renews our faith there are people out there who do their job effectively in the larger scheme of things, government especially. They do their job well. And we hardly know who or where they are. God bless them all and Jesse Robredo.
