I don’t know about other places, but in Brazil society as such is usually better than its political representatives: from the president to simple provincial councilors. That parliaments are a reflection of society, and even less of the most sacrificed, is pure fiction. What we call the “people” are usually better than those who represent them and should govern thinking about them and not about their personal privileges.
Sometimes it is newspaper readers who have the best sense of smell to analyze that abyss that sometimes exists between the interests of citizens and those of those who represent them. I read this morning in the newspaper Or Globe from Brazil a painful letter from reader Renato Pereira that denies that the Congress, mostly retrograde, “is the mirror of society” which, according to him, “is made up mostly of honest, hard-working and supportive people” who were the which in the past welcomed those seeking refuge fleeing the Holocaust perpetrated by Hitler and his Nazi government.
The example you just gave: the Brazilian Congress, trying to pass a law that can sentence a young woman who has an abortion after being raped to up to 20 years in prison, has outraged the vast majority of society. As well as the bad taste of a representative who brought a fetus to Congress to show it. Or the deputy who, after having punched a colleague in the face, shouted at him, looking him in the eyes: “And be thankful that I am without a gun.”
And perhaps this divorce between the feelings of society and the attitudes of many of its political representatives, increasingly focused on their own navel and the enrichment of their families and friends, is what is leading many countries in the world to solutions. of the extreme right, in the vain and false hope of politicians focused less on their personal interests and more on defending the customs and myths of homeland, god and order.
Perhaps, for all this, the phrase coined by the Spanish Francisco de Quevedo is once again current: “A powerful knight is a gift of money.” Money, necessary to live in peace, cannot become the purpose of multiple scandals of so many politicians despite having been elected many times with the shameless purchase of votes. Or the lightning enrichment of politicians and their families or the shameless accumulation of hundreds of personal privileges.
Lula has just, for example, canceled an auction to import 263,000 tons of rice and sell them at a better price in the market because he discovered the fact that the auction had been won by an insignificant company that sold cheeses and sweets. And there are dozens of public works in the states and provinces that often end up building asphalt roads to reach the politician’s family farm and even to build a private airport there. And that, in the light of the sun.
I make a parenthesis to remember that today, even the politicians who appear to have the greatest respect for democracy, cannot stand a free press and look for all means to combat it. Even here in Brazil, President Lula and, above all, his leftist party, the PT, complain every time that serious media, with quality controls, democratic, that want to make information free, do not kneel at their feet. It is curious how politicians are bothered by sometimes harsh words, which expose the underworld of their small or large corruptions.
In March of last year, in Valencia, Spain, during the Ortega y Gasset Awards ceremony, the director of this newspaper, Pepa Bueno, proudly praised the profession that does not “run away from barbarism, but rather portrays it so that “The crimes do not go unpunished, so that the world knows.” According to her, the function of the free press is to offer readers courageous and accurate information “to help them understand the world of global cacophony and the perverse use of words.”
On that day, curiously, the journalist Martín Caparrós, one of the great writers of today, was awarded the Ortega y Gasset with the Ortega y Gasset award. Perhaps it is not the case that when written language was invented it was already linked to money. In the first tablets from centuries ago, in Mesopotamia, in the Tower of Babel, they talked about beads and coins. Only later were the poems born, the words pregnant with creativity and liberating from deception, the metaphors and the words that ended up being at the same time more dangerous than the weapons themselves. These murder the body. Isn’t that “perverse use” of false or meaningless words, sometimes murderous, what fuels the discredit, not to say contempt, of the new generations for democracy?
Politics has plenty of empty words and lacks liberating and brave words that generate confidence in a world that knows badly at this moment. On which rails does the train of hope of new discoveries move? Will they make us freer or new slaves of perverse words with our eyes fixed on the powerful knight of our illustrious Quevedo?
Follow all the international information on Facebook and xor in our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#true #politicians #mirror #society