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Over the past several days, when I needed to watch the news on TV, I was forced to watch only the foreign news. I swung from CNN to BBC to Fox News and back to CNN again. There was just nothing on the Philippine news channels except Robredo this and Robredo that.

Don’t get me wrong. I hold the star-crossed DILG secretary in very high regard. But I just felt it nauseating for television to shepherd our remembrance of the man in the manner that it did with Dolphy, which was to bleed it of every second’s worth of airtime.

And just as one congressman has introduced a bill seeking to make July 10 of every year a special non-working holiday called Dolphy Day, there are now initiatives supposedly intended to introduce Robredo’s style of governance as a subject in the school curriculum.

With all due respect to the memories of Dolphy and Robredo, and to the sensibilities of their families and friends, I think Filipinos are simply going overboard with the manner in which they relate to these two recently-departed personalities.

And in the center of all this is Philippine television, playing the role of Pied Piper, leading all the rats to drown. And drown we all will if we do not find our sense of balance soon enough.

Bloodied and bruised though the Philippines may be in global perception, I do not think we are exactly a gone and unredeemable nation. For every bad Filipino who chooses to drop out of line, there must be another who silently steps up to the plate and takes up the slack.

Did you ever believe this country would not have collapsed long ago had it not been for the millions of silent and anonymous heroes who keep this country going? Heroism in not exactly rocket science. There is heroism in every selfless and unselfish act. And they happen everyday.

Robredo (sorry, but not Dolphy) most certainly was one of these ordinary heroes, who by the political circumstances of his calling, just happened to have been extricated from relative obscurity to the limelight.

His work was no different from what the millions of other unsung heroes do daily as part of their unflagging commitment to God and country. He simply benefitted from a little prominence, but not fairly and justifiably enough to go gaga over and do things we may only regret later.

Not that it is regrettable to teach goodness and decency, or have these virtues emulated by the young. But that is precisely what I mean by going overboard. We are simply star-struck by the relative freshness of the Robredo tragedy.

But let us give ourselves a few weeks, or even a few months. Would we still be so breathless about Robredo’s goodness and decency when, in fact, all our lives we have not been short of real models to pattern our lives after?

 Let me just cite two examples, one divine and another temporal, in Jesus Christ and Jose Rizal. Over the centuries, no more perfect model could have stood before us than Christ, and yet today we are no closer to perfection than first we beheld Him.

As to Rizal, everything about him remains a long-standing and integral part of the school curriculum. And yet no hero probably invites more snide remarks from the country’s young than he does. Examples: “Ano ka, Rizal?” or “Rizal? Nasa posporo lang ‘yan!”

We have beautiful memories of Robredo. Let us keep it that way. Let us not ruin it by forcing him into our consciousness where, as all human nature dictates, it can only invite eventual resentment.

Indeed, knowing what I know of the fickleness and excitability of the Filipino, I was forced to toy with this question — would Robredo have stirred the same passions had he died in a less dramatic way than a plane crash?