There are societies that live in denial, hiding, masking themselves. There are people who have made accommodation and a blind eye the basis of life. There are “cultures” of hypocrisy in which the habit of changing the names of things, looking for culprits where there are none, turning one’s back on the facts and keeping silent prevails. There are countries that were built on such soil. And there are doctrines that encourage the use of “mask ideology”. And now the post-truth.

Complicity, adaptation and “better stay out of trouble” are the ways of existence of falsified societies, without true citizenship, without civil militancy which is the opposite of politics. The ability to pretend and the habit of clapping while muttering curses fall away when any tragedy reveals that it was all tinsel, that it was all a story. Then the wolf’s ears perk up, races and fears arise. And the invention of justification arrives: we are not guilty of anything, the villains are gringos, or aliens, or ancestors, or conspirators. The others are bad, through their own fault, nothing. Everything from others.

Great tragedies have, amidst the calamities they cause, the virtue of removing the veils and exposing the truths of a society that refuses to see itself as it is. Floods that reach the coast every year with frightening accuracy, a mountain range that collapses, institutions that do not work, reveal chronic improvisation, decades of negligence and uselessness of the state. We have gone so far as to make such calamities a ritual of repeated offerings and speeches. Read the press from thirty years ago: the same, with other actors in the photos. Read the old chronicles, the same, with different chroniclers, but the same.

(…) It’s not our fault, the villains are gringos, or aliens, or ancestors, or conspirators.

Every week dozens of people die in absurd accidents or because of outrageous unforeseen events and shocking crimes. Every day there is more violence and more fear. Every week we are inundated with new scandals and, with unacceptable frequency, an innocent person is killed. These disasters reveal that something is wrong and that those who have the responsibility to prevent and punish are decorative figures, fictions of government, useless institutions.

Something is wrong. Between scandals and scandals, hiding from attacks, the company walks and its anxiety grows. Among the upheavals, crimes and floods, candidates for everything appear, the volume of disagreements increases, the quarrelsome call rises, and we continue, with victims on the edge of life, a mad race to nowhere, because, furthermore, there is no more time to think, there is no pause to the dead are honored. There is no space for the vocation to think, nor to demand that the government be up to the times and that the institutions regain the vocation of service that they lost a long time ago.

The complicity of our silence remains. What remains is our absurd resignation that looks like cowardice. (OR)