The night Brazil burned to death
When a museum OLDER than your country goes down in flames

Yesterday night we got home to be appalled by the sight of Brazil’s oldest museum burning down on live TV. Three paralysed firemen looked on the flames of a 200-year-old behemoth being dismantled piece by piece along with priceless discoveries such as Luzia: the oldest American fossil ever found.
The National Museum of Brazil (Rio de Janeiro) was once home of our last emperor, Don Pedro II, but was now a haven of unique scientific artefact and studies, including species died out so long ago that we still did know how to call them. Political activists said Brazil’s history burned yesterday, but they are wrong: every nation and human being lost a bit of themselves last night.
Dozens of young to-be scientists blotted out the façade with their faces bathed red by the flames’ reflection. Some cried whereas others risked their lives to rescue whatever they could — it was as if our own house was burning and a relative was about to die in the flames…and turns out it did.
“Luzia is dead.” — Kátia B., Nat. Heritage Museum president.
200 years of history were erased along with 20 MILLION artefacts. Pterodactyls? We had a third of the fossils worldwide. Mummies older than America? They finally decayed yesterday. A 80-million-year-old dinosaur of unmatched height in America? Cooked raw.
Name a Humanities field and we’ll scrabble for its ashes in the debris for you.
Brazilians are not fond of Museums (we are a so called third-world-country, so most of us barely know its worth), but even the “layest” of layman knew something was agonisingly wrong with the Don Pedro II’s statue that stands right in front of it. His now ash-black rocky-skin was a sight as dismaying as seeing your retired father shuddering in tears while his house burned — brick by brick — after a lifetime of hard work.

Those flames may only have killed us yesterday, but they also showed we’ve been bedridden since a long ago: firemen took 40 minutes to arrive in the spot and all they found was a broken hydrant in front of it. One of them realised they could pump water out of a nearby lake, but the leader warned: truck’s water pump was broken.
Their final take? “The building is old, so it helped feeding the fire.” (What an ahole that building is, isn’t it?)
That would be shocking if we hadn’t be talking about an impeding fire for the last 5 years and still no one moved a finger to save our oldest proof of history. Oops, some did: researches ponied up their own hard-earned money to keep maintenance personnel working in the building, and guess what?
The government — the very same that denied it maintenance all these years — tried to take them to jail for mixing public and private money. No wonder why the event also raised rumours about an arson attack since some politicians have been planning to turn the NATIONAL Museum, built in 1818 (71 years before the Republic), into a bus station.
You read it right: a 200-year Museum with 20 million artefacts belonging to 200 million Brazilians (and humanity itself) turned into a bus stop. Why don’t we make a parking lot out of the Louvre?!

“The firemen efforts was similar to throwing a bucket of water in a forest fire,” bystanders reported.
Whatever happened yesterday, Brazil proved to hate its history as politicians availed themselves of the tragedy while the flames still fed on the building. We are not losing our history, but actively erasing it — and the only destination a history-less people is bound to is eternal damnation.
