Who hasn’t dreamed of running, running away from a threat, but can’t get out of the way? It’s a common dream and it’s understandable, before any Freudian interpretation. The sleep stage that allows us to dream is accompanied by atony, the paralysis of arms and legs, hence the feeling of immobility that overwhelms the dream.
The nightmare I’ve been living awake for two years now is the result of imposed immobility in the United States and Brazil.
The soaring number of Covid-19 cases with the omicron variant was caused by vaccine inequality that allowed the virus to develop new strains in unimmunized populations in the poorest countries — a tragedy announced by epidemiologists. Here, the public who chose to refuse the vaccine remains unable to learn from the horror scenes in the ICUs, dying twice as often as triple-vaccinated people.
Two years of attacks on democracy and an increase in racial and religious violence in the US have taught Brazilians who voted for a more depraved Trump nothing and paved the way for the deaths of 620,000 people. And no matter the numbers make it clear that the vast majority wants to see the Planalto’s monster from behind: 47% of the Brazilian business community prefers more death, hunger, unemployment, indigenous genocide and massacres in favelas — anything not to elect their pet scarecrow.
The faint-hearted commentator of the political press learned nothing from its role, in 2018, of granting legitimacy to the candidacy of a lower-clergy jagunço who planned to plant bombs in barracks before being thrashed on the hand by the army. He is not ashamed of having manufactured a competent minister in the figure of a mediocre fantasist, pinched with the deserved disdain he aroused among economists’ peers.
The same absolutists who select the king of the day make wide-open electoral marketing for a hollow stick that doesn’t leave single digits in the polls, never managed even a booth at the free fair and abused the Judiciary to interfere in the 2018 election.
They don’t learn anything.
Living in Brazil is to run all the time without leaving your place. We are hostages to the arrogance of a nihilist elite that hates the country and promotes a permanent burning of the stock — the forests, the young bodies pierced by bullets, the brains that fled abroad.
After two years of isolation and successive canceled plans to reunite with my family, my only expectation for 2022 is to get out of the place. For this it is necessary to remove obstacles of all kinds and, above all, to defeat the perpetrator of crimes against humanity at the ballot box.
But it is also important to call for justice for the accomplices in this intentional killing of Brazilians (see Renan Calheiros’s list); resisting sociopaths who think that infecting us in a pandemic is exercising individual freedom; and not condoning the degradation of my profession, whose duty it is to defend democracy, not inventing tailor-made candidates to keep Brazil mired in the worst that has taken place in public life.
Leaving the place is not going forward with amnesia. None of the sly people in the three Powers, those who thought the advance of the Military Party on our democracy was normal, the false repentants who asked again to buy on our counter, none of them deserves forgiveness of the debt they contracted with Brazil.
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