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 One more week filled with surprises, squabbles, charges and, especially, population skepticism not only towards their rulers, but also towards the democratic institutions.
As absurd or cruel this may seem, if a strong civilian or military adventurer showed up, took over the power and announced he was shutting down Congress, eliminating political parties, filling prisons with all those who had their names involved in the plunderage that is ravaging us - what would the society's reaction be?
We Paint an Impossible Picture
Intellectuals would protest on the pubs's tables over a draught beer, radicals of the Left would once again consider going into hiding. But the elites would applaud, as long as the current economic policy was kept.
The newspapers would quietly accept, some clamoring for the return of censorship, which supposedly would absolve them from any responsibility, others acquiescing in an obscene way with the new government.
The middle class, as long as they could count on a little relief for their hardship, would stay where it always has been, that is, living its life. The masses, disillusioned with everything, would survive watching certain privileged people losing their privileges.
Churches would continue promising salvation in heaven and sacrifices down here. And soccer clubs, who knows, would bring some good vibes, in case the new power owners prohibited the sale of the best athletes to foreign clubs.
It's a horror, this possibility, that is not going to take us anywhere. A fortunately remote hypothesis since there is no power structure in Brazil capable of replacing the PT, which has been all broken up. We would have to start all over again, perhaps not within 21 years (the time the 1964-1985 military dictatorship lasted), but 42 years.
Stacks of master and Ph.D. theses would be written trying to explain the change, as well as, once again, dozens of Brazilianists would invade the country, avidly searching for data and documents that they would never understand, as they haven't understood anything until today.
We have painted an unworkable situation, which some naïve people will rush to reject for its packaging, never for its content. Some might even falsely accuse this unlucky writer of wishing all of this.
Thanks heaven there are no terrain for such an outcome, but if things remain the way they are soon emptiness will set itself up among us. And emptiness, in politics, is an abstraction. It does not happen, since the spaces must always be filled up .
PT Dream Turned into Nightmare
With all respect, the Lula government is finished. The dream once dreamt by the PT has been turned into a nightmare led by Dirceus, Delúbios, Valérios and the like. But only by them? No at all. You only get corrupters when there are also people willing to be corrupted.
And we are not just talking about the Congress and parties' plunderers, subscribers to the mensalões (monthly allowances) and hard cash. Who is sick is the society, resigned before the forceps of an economic model that doesn't do more than make the wealthy wealthier and the poor and disadvantaged even poorer.
Salaries and compensations lose 15% of their purchasing power a year. They are not even readjusted, according to the inflation that has been contained, with the exception of privileged categories that concentrate all the power of the union movement. Union organizations like CUT and Força Sindical and the like are only concerned with corporativism.
They shrug their shoulders to the dozens of millions of companions abandoned to their own luck. The foreign and public debts grow in geometric progression, while our capacity of paying them, don't grow even in arithmetic progression. Our feeling of sovereignty and nationality just goes down the drain.
Hope turned into frustration and cannot even transform itself into indignation any more. Next year, even with an increase in abstentions and blank and invalid votes, the electorate will end up voting for these same people as always or their spiritual heirs.
The farce will continue to be staged, no matter who is the new President of the Republic, no matter if he is called José, Geraldo, Fernando, César or Anthony.
It hardly will be Luiz, but even if this happens what changes can we expect?
"Walker, there is no path; you make the path by walking," sentenced the Spanish poet Antonio Machado a long time ago. The devil is that to walk Brazil needs legs, and it does not have them.
The potentates will tell you that you are wrong, that industry is growing, that agriculture is picking up, that exports are on the increase and that Brazilian leadership is more and more recognized around the world.
All of this is true, but only in their little world, of speculations, of coups, of free competition between uneven quantities, of ostriches who bury their head in the sand amid the tempest.
The experience of a worker in power was the last one we were missing. It has shown to be more than insufficient, because failed. From the coffee barons of the incipient Republic to the caudillos, from the military to the politicians, from the adventurers to the naïve politicos, the population falls for anyone as if he were the salvation, generally regretting a little too late, filled with discouragement.
Our grandchildren and offspring will have it even worse, since they will be forced to enter this vile struggle for life, where a colleague at his side is an opponent and the neighbor on the right, an enemy.
To whom can we appeal? One beautiful day we will discover that we can only count on ourselves. No way we can count on political parties, motherland saviors, or corporative groups, much less on promises. We must count on ourselves. In the plural. We had enough singulars.
Carlos Chagas writes for the Rio's daily Tribuna da Imprensa and is a representative of the Brazilian Press Association, in Brasília. He welcomes your comments at carloschagas@hotmail.com.
Translated from the Portuguese by Arlindo Silva.
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