Making Heroes out of the Ordinary

On March 29, 2003, then Naga City Mayor Jesse Robredo delivered this address during the Commencement Exercises of the Ateneo de Manila University in Quezon City. Here is the text taken from the website of the Naga City Government (http://www.naga.gov.ph/cityhall/ademu2003.html)

I was moved when I read this. Sharing here is one part of his speech with the title "Making Heroes out of the Ordinary."

Our political history has shown that we have put the burden of running this country to our “best” people for too long. And yet the gap between the rich and the poor has grown wider. For this country to succeed, we need to make heroes of the ordinary people. We need to make heroes of ourselves.

 I must say that the ordinary employees and constituency have made the success of Naga possible. In Naga City, we have a woman street sweeper, who held on to her broom for twenty years. Literally, she had swept every square inch of the city’s business district. But through sheer determination, she was able to finish her secondary studies in a night school and graduated, at 54, with a bachelor’s degree, some 8 years after her own daughters had theirs. To her the City of Naga conferred the Mayoral Award for becoming an inspiration to ordinary citizens, one who despite overwhelming odds, has risen above them. Today her broom has become a diploma. The woman was not an honor graduate --- but an ordinary citizen, struggling to make life better for her family.

Why am I relating this to you, my dear graduates, and my dear ladies and gentlemen?

 It is because the world today lacks the values that used to mold the disposition and the character of the ordinary citizen.

The world today, despite the advances in science and technology, has yet to learn about how to live, what to do, and how to be. As one tired and retired government employee remarked, “One learns many things when one gets to be my age. But one has to unlearn many more things that one has gathered with age.”

In pre-school, as bestseller writer Robert Fulghum observed, we used to be taught these: “Share everything. Play fair. Do not cheat. Don’t hit people. Put things back where you find them. Clean up your own mess. Don’t take things that aren’t yours… When you go out into the world, hold hands and stick together.”

 How sad --- after ten years in basic education and four years in higher education -- we seem to have forgotten the basic tenets learned in pre-school.

When graduates go out into the world of business or politics or entertainment or government service, will they still “share everything”, “play fair”, “put things back where they find them”, and “clean their own mess”?

Our experience in governance in Naga City is nothing but our personal encounter with the necessity of returning to the basic governance --- a return to the essential meaning of service --- a return to what is simple and practical --- a return to the values that our forefathers taught us: the value of honesty, hard work, of fairness and most all the holy fear of a just God.