How to vote broken souls, I asked myself 15 days ago. I didn’t know if my old legs would allow me to reach that blackboard of 21 small schools in the Republic of Bolivia.

“No tears or screams or hugs are enough to ease this much pain, this much horror,” I wrote. But there was enough anger and enough words and enough force to get me to vote. To say yes to democracy, yes to life, yes to peace. Yes, yes, yes and yes to the forest, the jungle, the wind and the stream.

I was saved from fear by the words of my #Favoritestudent, writer Paulina Narváez, when I heard her read her text during our appointment on Thursday: “Who said all is lost, I come to offer my heart. So much blood that the river carried away, I come to offer my heart.

No one comes here to offer anything alive, because it is not wind, nor air, nor foam, nor anything.

They keep breaking us, they keep crushing us, they don’t move because nothing matters to them; because the dead are not theirs, because the homeland is only a courtyard where they are trampled, opened, raped, killed. Because they know that the world is big and that they are covered by other wicked hands; because the homeland, this homeland, is not theirs…”.

With my heart in one piece, I listened to him until the end. Fito Páez and Negra Sosa made my blood run cold. But it was this powerful text that saved me, shook me and forced me to go to the polls. It was Pauli, and there were others, many others…

The election results never cease to amaze us. Octavio Paz visits me in my dreams, and at dawn I lock myself in the bathroom because his words persuade me, but I don’t want to wake Santi. “No one heard: Mexico did not change direction, the governments did not bet on reforms, but on routine continuity and mere survival, while intellectuals stuck to increasingly simple and caricatured versions of Marxism,” he said in the 90s, and his relevance is resounding, without folds or chaquiñanes: precise.

Young people want a united country, a country that stands, not one that rests on its laurels.

There will be people who will believe that the second round will be between the left and the right, between the free market which, following the path of the Mexican Nobel laureate, “…creates, at the same time, an area of ​​abundance and poverty . He distributes consumer goods and misery with the same indifference”; and, the alleged left that (commits) “abuse and waste of human and natural resources, pharaonic works (but without the beauty of the Egyptians), general poverty, slavery of workers and a regime of privileges for the bureaucracy”.

No, the decision will definitely be between satiety and a thread of hope. Young people want a united country, a country that stands, not one that rests on its laurels. We have already inherited some broken ones, let them go their own way, no left, no right, no hatred. Hopefully they can unite our parts, become one, see the front.

Many years ago, when they were not born, we were a country of peace. We ordered the collars and cuffs of our shirts to be turned, we inherited our brothers’ clothes, flew kites and dreamed. We hope we can dream again. (OR)