‘Everything is eventual’

I NEVER met Jesse Robredo. But from what I’ve known about him—from his pronouncements, from the news, and now from the testimonials given upon his death—I feel I’ve known him enough to feel a desperate sense of loss myself. In particular I feel gratified by his relentless crusade against the culture of patronage. I heard or read him uttering the very phrase, although the vaguest allusion to it produced a resonance that did not fail to move me to cheerlead, That’s our man!

This culture, to me and, I’d like to think, to him as well, is the very scourge of our lives—a scourge of class injustice.

Now stripped transparent, as death is said to render everyone facing final accountability, Jesse should by all accounts be able to banish whatever doubt may yet persist that, among all the other things right about him, he was the right man in the right place at the right time in our history—Secretary of the Interior and Local Government in the presidency of Benigno S. Aquino III. And, if in that one tragic moment beyond human choice or control he found himself on the wrong plane, leaving us suddenly orphaned, as seems the story of our national life, that’s something we will just have to, yet again, transcend and take as a positive antecedent for our own sakes.

Surely, no good man’s death can be in vain.

Jesse’s own is the latest link in a chain of fateful August passings, the first of his generation, the third in recent history, the other two being the deaths of his own president’s parents—Ninoy and Cory.

Twenty-nine years to the day Jesse was found dead under the sea, on August 21, Ninoy, returning from exile in the United States on a mission of deliverance, took an assassin’s bullet even before he could set foot on home soil. The martyrdom set in motion a slow-simmering revolution that would boil over three years later on the nation’s veritable Main Street, EDSA. There, as well as on other, provincial, main streets, people massed and by the sheer force of their number—more than a million—and their irrepressible stand booted off the dictator across the Pacific to Hawaii.

Ferdinand Marcos’s regime finally dismantled after 14 repressive years, the mother herself of that bloodless revolution, Ninoy’s widow, Cory, was installed democratic president. She remained the nation’s moral compass after her tenure, speaking out, rallying the nation, leading it when official and other traditional leaderships failed it. She died on August 1, 2008, only 75 years old, too soon for a nation living off hope. As it also happened, she died at a time made dramatic by the ebbing years of the scandal-plagued presidency of Gloria Arroyo, a time when the nation was crying for redemption and retribution.

On a fresh mandate of fate intimated by his mother’s passing and a popular call for him to step up, Noynoy overcame his doubts, obliged, and ran for the presidency. On June 30, 2010, he assumed it—then picked Jesse.

As one ethereally sensitive author—Stephen King—says, “Everything is eventual.”

And so it has been from Ninoy to Cory to Noynoy to Jesse, whose death leaves now a critical portfolio, one he had prepared for a person who may well rise from it to a presidency that will carry on with Noynoy’s own too-short one for anything reformatively eventual to really happen.

Whether or not he proves to be our man, it will be Noynoy’s choice.