Paper was big business 30 years ago, when I went to the States to loiter on the backpacker-underemployed-daddy’s boy scheme. Newspapers and magazines sold hundreds of thousands of copies, even in Brazil.
American street corners were lined with metal crates I’d never seen before, each with a different newspaper for sale. I was very surprised that they worked like this: the person deposited a coin that unlocked a door, opened it and took the first newspaper in a pile.
If I wanted, I could take the whole pile. That bugged my brasuca cachola. Pork spirit has all over the world, how do gringos give a mole like that?
In rich countries, parks have no fence. Public transport is progressively phasing out the turnstiles.
They kind of trust the citizens. Not quite (and the smart-ass Brazilian always finds out), because sporadic inspections frame the thieves by sampling. Anyway, life without turnstiles and locks is good.
Brazil, on the other hand, is experiencing the opposite phenomenon. Now they were able to pass the key in the supermarket meat fridge.
The butcher shop became a jewelry store.
– Please, how much is the fillet medallion?
– Here is our catalogue, sir. We also have picanha, but at this hour the safe is already closed. Tomorrow we can serve you.
– Thank you very much, I don’t want to take anything now. I’m looking for something to give my wife for her silver wedding anniversary. Return if interested.
There’s a lock on the bathroom at the gas station, the clothes have a magnetic tag that beeps, the whiskey shelves at the market are full of empty cardboard boxes. They request authorization, in three carbon copies, to release AAA batteries and 41-blade razors from stock.
The citizen is a potential thief or vandal, in wealthy areas with a mostly white population.
If you’re black in a wealthy neighborhood, you’ll be chased by security; if it’s black in a poor neighborhood, it can be much worse.
See the case of Bruno and Ian, Salvador’s uncle and nephew, handed over by the supermarket guards to a gang of militiamen, who executed them. His crime was trying to steal meat.
Well… if they’re trying to cut the meat, it makes sense to lock the fridge, doesn’t it? For the merchant, it might even do. In the bigger picture, the lock is a symbol of our civilizational setback. A symptom of the ever-deeper plunge into barbarism.
Americans and Europeans are neither better nor more civilized than we are. They settled into a relatively recent prosperity – gained on the basis of trebuchet and the plunder of other peoples.
History shows how tenuous this balance is. Any shake, there they go looting, stealing, depredating. They regress to barbarism in war that keeps returning, in recurring natural disasters, in reaction to unpopular rulers.
The main engine of savagery is hunger. No one steals meat from the market out of trickery, addiction or sport.
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