I'm an old man now. I've gained as much in cynicism as I've lost in naiveness. I'm not as enthusiast and I've grown embittered and sad. And as I write down my last report, and look back to all that has happen to us, I cannot help feeling that I had been wrong about my vision of life. It is not like a snowball that due to some uncontrollable forces starts to develop downhill towards a nicer warmer valley. My first impression was that we never actually reached that promised valley in the first place. It was as if in that valley there was a wild river and we just fell into that, and kept riding it in a mad roller coaster, which seemed out of control. And as we rolled down, sometimes still breathing, sometimes drowning, it was as if the river went through narrow canyons and we could not come out of it. But now near the end I see that life is more like a pinball machine. There is this ball, which represents things (the economy, society, happiness, and so on) that gets thrown up by circumstances and then starts coming down, and as it comes down, it bounces and ricochets in all sorts of complex phenomena and it gains momentum towards the bottom, and then someone has to bounce it back with a pad, back to the top or at least keep it in the board, because if not... the game may be over. But it seems that each time this ball is thrown back up it gains weight, and when it comes down it comes heavier and demands all our strength to pad it back up, and then you get tired and old... and you hope someone will pick up the pad and do it...
Can it get any worse? The answer to that is the same as before, but how could it ever get any better from where we were is a more subtle matter. What had lead us to catastrophe before was a series of misfortunes, now what could bring us back could only be a series of good-fortunes.
But first let me tell you a bit more how things got bad:
As you'll remember I'd been fired, evicted, and run out of money. I had spent most of it trying to buy expensive banana to get my hair back, and not only did I not get it back as I kept losing more and more. There was no other job I knew how to do so I tried to keep doing agriculture. Some friends and I went to the woods and what was left of it and tried to clear another part of it to grow some orange trees, we figured other people by now would be missing them too. Unfortunately we were met by more dogs, and now it was forbidden to plant in those woods since they had become protected natural reserve, although there were no animals left in it and the trees were sick. They claimed, that this was exactly why they felt they had to protect it now, funny that nobody thought about it before they started devastating the woods in the first place. Some other people managed to cultivate some arid land way on the outskirts of the country, with enormous effort to water it, but as soon as they had a crop, that could mean some competition to the Chitita Corp. they were bought out of business and offered minor jobs at the corporation.
A lot of people went into business by themselves doing other things, like polishing shoes or cleaning toilettes for the top managers of the corporation. Some actually had it very good. A middle class of people dedicated to provide other more value added services of marketing, engineering and consultancy had it very easy. But even in that middle class there were discrepancies that began to exacerbate, those people dedicated to education, health and justice empowerment, saw their positions in society being constantly undermined by bad government and eventually lost motivation and lost quality of life. Yes, we had become mostly a services country by now. Mind me, when I say that things were bad, they were not actually bad in absolute terms for the whole of the country. Even me in my poorest phases now, I had never been again as hungry as I had been many years before when our crops failed. And I did not feel as restricted and censured in my behaviour as in those times, even if strict censorship had been replaced by a softer form called “politically correct”. But relatively, things had never been so unequal. Before, in the old days, we all ate from the same pot, whether government or worker. Now, the richer kept getting richer and the poorer, poorer. There was clearly a deficit of fairness and a great amount of greed. And the growth of this gap meant that if you weren't part of the right group, your hopes for a cross-over and for a brighter future were getting slimmer and slimmer as the gap got bigger and bigger and that hopelessness lead many people astray, to quit education and to fall into vice or uncontrolled consumerism.
In the meantime, and on top of this social unrest, the land which had been intensively cultivated for the last years started to give in and became exhausted. The crops started to fail. Not only that, but due to the excessive fertilizer usage most of our water was contaminated and a lot of new diseases that we had never know before started to appear. The rich drank bottled foreign water and therefore were immune. Lucky for them. I too got sick. But since I could not afford to pay for the private medical insurance, I had to just tough it out, the pain, the fever, the coughing. After that I could not hold a plough any more. I became a bum.
Chitita Corp. converted from a fruit plant into a pharmaceutical plant, to provide medicine for all the now sick people. And there was a lot of sick out there in the world who wanted to buy some of that medicine too, so it was great business for them. Now the pharmaceutical plant, made a lot of pollution, and often had to dump some of its chemical waste back into the lakes, this made the water even worse and created a whole new set of diseases of treat. And the pharmaceutical became even bigger, and so on, in a growing spiral.
Jobs for bums were difficult to come by and I eventually sold my 4 sqm. apartment to a family of 5, for some money. And I went to live out in the street, I wasn't scared, I'd often slept under the orange trees as a young boy, the cold did not scare me, even if I had been sick. But after the first nights out, I started to get really scared. Our country had developed an intense night entertainment industry, including night clubs where people could get seriously drunk, drugged and even buy young men and women for sexual pleasure. Now the nights were crowded with a strange fauna of owls, going about these places in enthusiastic moods. It was not uncommon that shouting and fighting would start and eventually lead to shooting, that would hurt innocent by-standers. Most people were now carrying guns for protection. Robbery attempts had gone up dramatically, insurances were at a premium. Many blamed it on the poorer foreigners who kept pouring in, running away from their own poor countries and misery. Our country was in an official state of war with our neighbour, it was said that the neighbour had become a fanatic religious terrorist and hate us deeply, for whatever what, I could not tell then, and I never even knew the neighbour was religious at all, we'd never heard of it.
At my age I did not hate anybody any more, and I blamed no-one for our situation but myself. After all if I hadn't been so lazy all those years ago, maybe my wife would not have forced me to make those cupboards and we would have kept reserves for that bad winter, and then we wouldn't have been so desperate to bring about all those changes. Maybe we would have done it like the neighbour and built only one road, and built up our production capability slowly, and caring for its impact in the environment and the people, a step at the time. Maybe we wouldn't have needed Cap to help us with the food corporation, maybe my wife could have done it just fine, after all she'd been doing it for so long and kept doing it afterwards for the corporation, and she could not possibly have been blamed for the weather when that calamity happened. But even the neighbour who had built up his economy in a more sustainable way, was not entirely protected from cheating in the free market and bad will, and that made his economy collapse, so who knows what would have happened if things hadn't happened the way they happened.
At that point, as it was, the country was in the hands of an enormous corporation, and the corporation was in fact itself, a country, a virtual one, without land or borders, but nevertheless a country, and an egotistic one at that, that cared only for its own inhabitants, the employees, event then, mostly for its managers, who had millionaire salaries and bonuses. It had a logo for a flag, a jingle for a hymn, which was played continuously by this Merdia guy driving his van around (everybody figured by now he was no scientist, just a loud mouth). And it had its own army, a private security force of angry dogs. It could take over our country if it wanted, there was no more Waldy around to prevent it. Our own democracy was a joke. At the beginning we cared to debate ideas and needs and to choose the best candidate, now the election campaign debates had turned into a circus. The candidates would just have vans shout out their names very loud and then would meet in a public arena and throw cream pies at each other and the one that came out the cleanest and smartest looking was chosen to represent us, but nobody really expected them to do much. Mostly they would do their utmost to issue laws that pleased the corporation, expecting a nice job there in return. Unemployment was rampant, but the country kept exporting tremendously, mostly goods that were bought at cheap price for speculation, or to be packed with a nice brand and promotion campaign and then resold at twice the purchase price as fashion items for enormous profits. Our country, as I said, offered an assortment of services, provided by just a few educated people with good corporate connections. The rest of the people started parallel illegal markets to make money, involving mostly drugs, falsified corporate branded fashion items and electronics. The little money people got was immediately spent on consuming cheap goods for pleasure, like an addiction. Needs were exacerbated by fashion and publicity, and by quick obsolescence of goods. People drank much more, not out of pleasure or laziness, or even because they had worked a hard 16 hours long day at the plant, but because they had no work, no future and wanted to forget about their families demanding them for more than they could provide.
One night as I was sitting around a fire together with another group of bums at the end of an alley, I noticed an old lady, wrapped in a blanket, shivering. I asked if she was cold. Her eyes were frozen and in them I saw death approaching, she said only these words: “my baby... in the basket”. My heart shrank. I thought of him, I had hated him, I would have had him expelled, where was he then? I thought of my wife, had she forgotten us? Had she cared for the baby? When I looked back the old woman had given up living. Do coincidences exist? Really? If not, I cannot explain why when I got on my feet, I saw my wife approaching. She was looking around, walking slowly, sometimes kneeling to see the bums. I came closer and said hello. She had a tear falling out the corner of her eye, which she immediately wiped. “Hello my dear, how are you?”, she said in a mellow voice. I hadn't seen her in so long, she kept her beauty intact, her hair just a bit greyer. I said I was fine, all things considered, and asked her about the baby. It seems he had gotten a fantastic education abroad and was now the new CEO of the Chitita Corp. She then took my arm, and asked me in my ear: “What have I done?”. I wanted to explain to her that it was not her fault, it was in fact mine , and she continued: “Do you remember the song?”. The song was an ancient myth of our country, it was a set of very old verses passed from mother to daughter, of which my wife had been the keeper. It went like this:
"From your womb, a flower will grow, her stem of white, her leaves of green, her petals of gold her eyes of blue. With her petals she covers the sun that burns the land, with her leaves she covers the land from the snow that freezes, her stem is strong and her eye is smart, and she will love you, like you will love her, oh Sousalandia."
I have failed my country and my people, I sold us, my wife said, but I still love you, will you help me? I could never refuse her anything, so I followed her. She had abandoned the corporation, and with the money she had, we bought a van of our own and drove around the countries shouting what unfair deeds the corporation had been doing. Every time we denounced something the corporation went to great length to amend their ways, and we discovered we had the power to change things. They were afraid the bad publicity would prevent people from buying their products, so we kept at it until we were too tired and old. Many times we got mysterious flat tires and engine break downs, as if to prevent us from proceeding, but it didn't deter my wife and her determination to make things right again. Sometimes I'd ask her if she didn't prefer we'd go somewhere far and start another little farm, just with a few tomatoes and oranges. She would tell me, she'd been everywhere and this place did not exist any more. Everywhere there were roads now. There was no going back.
When one day we returned to our country, ready to retire, we came across something fantastic in the park. My wife pointed at a woman who spoke to the people around her. But this was not just any woman, this, we could see was a special being. You could feel it before you even listened to her. Her skin was a beautiful mulatto brown tonality that expressed in the most splendid way the mix of ethnics of our country of today, her eyes were blue but orientally drawn backwards. She wore a simple white and green dress, and a golden sun-flower in her hair. She moved in a gracious way that told you she was a mother. But not that mother that has 3 children and runs around them in immense worries. She is the woman that has grown into the wisdom and maturity that is required to mother someone, her name was Fairy Trady. And we listened to her, this is what she was saying:
“A child is put into this world unprotected and unable. It's her mother's job to raise her, to educate her in the basic ways of the world, to feed her, to decide for this child on how to dress, how to behave. To censor the behaviours that offend her own principles and to give those principles to the child. When that child becomes of a certain age, then it is given to the hands of the teacher. And the teacher knows better of the complex ways of the world, its dangers, but also its opportunities, and from the teacher and his example, that young person learns for himself what is right and what is wrong, for him, for his fellow man and the land he inherited. And one day that person is ready to take his life in his own hands, without the mother and without the teacher. The teacher, has his own interests, he benefits from having the student, that's what he's paid for, and will keep telling the young person that he is not ready to take on the world, that he needs supervision. But that bond also has to be broken. It's the natural way. Likewise is a country. It is born into the dictating hands of a ruler, that shapes it and brings it up, some more strict and censoring, some more benevolent and compassionate. One day, that bond is freed and in comes the corporations, that teach that country to do business, to relate to the world, to produce and to trade. But one day, that bond too must be broken. The people does not need for ever a paternalistic figure that cares for every aspect of their life. They need guidance, support and motivation, but not a cradle. They don't fit in it any more. The real power to the people will come only when the people is truly empowered, not just to choose government or choose the corporation they'll work for, or what they will buy, but empowered to contribute as an individual, as a skilled individual, to the country economy. And in today's age of global communication and trade, that individual does not need the teacher or the corporation to sort out the complexity of the world, it is there, ready to be explored. The corporation will survive, because the teacher doesn't die, but its role should be that of teaching and of bringing skilled people together in projects and associations with the world but then letting them free. It is unfair that the teacher becomes rich out of exploring the student. And as for the mother, she will always love and look out after her child, and make sure she eats well and is warmly dressed, and healthy, and that the world treats it right, no matter how far they may be.”
My wife and I looked at each other, and without words we knew that the prophecy could still become true, a new flower had grown into the womb of our land, and things may just be getting better. Now whether this vision was really true or just the dream and delusion of an old man in his death berth, I cannot really tell any more, as I am now dead. I do know this, things may be getting better or worse, but they'll always be getting somewhere. Fairness will make things better, greed will make things worse, for all. Thank you, if you read this far. But if you're wondering what does this whole tale mean, and what am I trying to say, then read the next post as well.
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