So the good die young...

This post would have been entitled “Where in Masbate is Jesse Robredo?” had I finished writing it last night. 

After more than a day of not finding anything but a wing, a flight plan, and a windshield, the prospect of finding them alive seemed quite dim. 

I was going to talk about how nice it was that people were united in prayer and in the search efforts. It was nice to see diver volunteers step up while other volunteers from all over just flocked to help out. 

But as it is, the body has been found and has been brought to Naga. 

To be honest, the moment I heard about the plane crash my first thoughts were:  sabotage? 

I actually said this out loud to a number of people before I realized I sounded like a conspiracy theorist. 

I just thought it was so sudden and so random. And, I suppose, I’ve always thought that people who fought corruption and blocked corrupt elements are at high risk of being taken out sooner or later. 

I could tell you that this line of thinking makes me a cynic but I suppose it really does not.  It, unfortunately, just makes me a realist.  

But putting thoughts of conspiracies aside, all I can say is that the crash simply made me sad. 

A sudden plane crash. Relatives and friends in tears.  A man with a very good public service reputation, rare and almost extinct in our time, dies. It's just sad. 

They said he was very real. They said he was very sincere. They said he was the real deal. His constituents loved him. He was voted in for 6 terms in Naga. His employees loved him and were inspired by him. So many good words have been said. 

Today I heard a candid interview of his speech writer on the radio. She said so many good things about the DILG secretary, she mentioned a conversation she had with Robredo in which she asked if good governance was really possible. She said that Robredo said that there will always be politics involved but that as long as they put the measures in place, like his full disclosure policy that aims to promote transparency, that the citizens will eventually demand for good governance and everything else will follow. The speechwriter said that he never lost hope in the Philippines. She was in tears, which also brought Winnie Cordero, the radio interviewer at that time, in tears. 

Perhaps Winnie Cordero really felt her sincerity. After, she said on air, still in tears, “Bakit ang good kinukuha, bakit ang bad hindi kinukuha”.  

It’s been said that the good die young. And with everything that Jesse Robredo stood for and with every anecdote and story that’s revealed about him, his untimely death all the more becomes sadder.