There comes a time in a mind’s winter years when the need to be assured of its vigor must be faced with gallantry instead of trepidation. If only to bolster confidence that Mr. Alzheimer is yet far albeit lurking in the distant horizon. A way to do that is by recalling decades before events and people in one’s adult years to recent memories of septuagenarian days. A healthy brain is an indelible papyrus for heroes and their acts of heroism whose impact to society lingered and will continue to do so, impinging into current events.
Such is the case if in the month of August one is to cogitate august men in the likes of Ninoy Aquino and Jesses Robredo. Both had monumental deaths in August. Alzheimer is beside the point for old folks who can recall Rizal (of ancient memory), Ninoy Aquino (a distant memory), and Jesse Robredo, when the flowers on and his grave are still fresh. The details of their deeds and the force of their characters suggest that Rizal’s own may have influenced Ninoy and Jesse.
The conjecture is not mathematical. One equals two if Rizal has somehow produced Ninoy and Jesse. Accepting that seeming illogic, then one plus one can be more than two, or two plus or even infinity. Ninoy’s and Jesse’s incremental impact and influence to men and events over indefinite time can be incalculable. As a true to life movie has even shown to the world’s public that a beautiful mind can even lead to a Nobel Prize. The point remains stark and hopeful. Ninoy’s and Jesse’s idealism and extra-ordinariness might yet find themselves resurrected in a few thousand Filipino public servants.
BUT, where is Rizal in Ninoy Aquino and Jesse Robredo? Perhaps we can discern the answers from the way they had lived their lives.
Ninoy was born of elite family in a farming hacienda town owned by few rich family while Jesse was born in a modestly urbanized commercial town of varied land ownership. In a figurative sense, Ninoy was a hacienda boy while Jesse was very likely a poblacion boy. In the late fifties it was said that the number of land owners in a town is an indication of the hard lives or the easy lives of the town folks.
Among poorer provinces, the extent of tenancy mandates the need for land reform. In a way Ninoy and Jesse were born and grew up in towns that are different. It’s like two boys growing among two sets of people, nurturing and developing different depths of sympathy and compassion. Later in their lives, Ninoy’s acquired empathy perhaps was wholesale and Jesse, retail. Their selfless concern for people however, ends in equal almost heroic significance.
Ninoy’s rise in community and national public service was meteoric: international war correspondent in his late teens; youthful town mayor, vice governor, governor, and youngest elected senator. He was the young government negotiator across the table with seasoned communists leaders. With hindsight one can say his political vitality and leadership were world class than third world. Ninoy’s legacy, might be unfelt, intangible and therefore debatable to a faceless mass of several generation. Who will for example among the descendants of his detractors agree and acknowledge that his wife Cory restored democracy to the country; that Ninoy’s son Noynoy is trying to weld together the useful fragments of a society that’s been for several decades pillaged by greed for power and money.
In contrast what is scant and publicly known about Jesse Robredo’s life-long achievements are less spectacular, more humble, slow and gradual and can even be called that of a late bloomer. In public service and in territorial scale Jesse’s good deeds are narrower but more concrete and tangible as appreciated by the Naguenos of Bicol. Jesse’s legacy is like third world though regionally recognized. Jesse’s people have faces very recognizable both from the needy and middle class who felt the impact of his actions. Jesse fought not tyrants and their greed and lust for power but the very conditions of a debilitating physical and moral environment. He enticed and enthused people to improve their lot.
Both Ninoy and Jesse chose their own battles, their own foes as they stood in front of their disadvantaged fellowmen. The former chose to fight bad men and their politics while the latter chose to overcome the dismal conditionality of his physical and moral environment. Perhaps their theory and practice of leadership as public servants diverged. Jesse placed importance on knowing what it is so it can produce effective results. Jesse said it is first and foremost character, because skills and competence can be learned while Ninoy was more conscious of righteousness in the practice of leadership.
To Ninoy because of his youthful exposure to bloody combat (the Korean war at age 17) and face to face dealings with home grown dissidents and crooked politicians, leadership is about results. What is its nature is given. Leadership is the dynamic aspect of character. It is the consequence of character that’s been put into action. It is forceful patriotism to say “the Filipino is worth dying for.” It is his specific definition of courage and martyrdom. Ninoy’s and Jesse’s divergence on the issue of leadership enriches the concept rather cancel each other.
Remembering Don Quijote of La Mancha of a distant land and distant past as symbolic of bad political times and of a fictionalized quixotic struggle against the ruling establishment; Jose Rizal’s windmill was the entire Spanish colonialism inflicted to his country while Ninoy Aquino’s windmill was Marcos’ dictatorship. Jesse Robredo could be the Sancho Panza whose humble contribution to shake and rattle the windmill from its rampart was no less significant. True life stories because of their brain and bloodshed from their hearts, like those of Ninoy and Jesse tugged at our souls better than those of Spain’s fictional Don Quijote and Sancho Panza.
In his days, Rizal might have said of them; ‘They are brothers of different times who fell in the night as they were put down by the not too tender mercies of adversity.”
Ah, Yes about the numbers in the article’s title when one plus one is not equal to two. It does not seek or intend to mislead. The heroism of the Filipino race is always more than, yes, even greater than the sum of its heroes.