Photo by Akshar Dave on Unsplash

From the shame that I am, to the shame that we are

I think about making all my embarrassments public, everything that embarrasses me. We live in a society where people identify at the same time with the culture of sitting down and with the priest’s philosophical speech, there is no criticism of the mentions I make, I understand the various tastes, it gives me pleasure to see the differences, the needs , the nuances. It is that between one pole and another I am, a consumer of violence, sex, the lack of being perceived, the need to empathize with those who suit me. I grew up watching the “good guy” blow up the bandit in half, at the same time that my religious culture of the time preached, so that we would love others, as ourselves. Next to me? My beliefs? My parents’ values ​​and virtues? My social class? Who are my neighbors?

We were launched then, like someone who throws the light of a lantern towards a closed forest, on a moonless night. We set out to understand. Reports, studies, fraternity campaigns, inclusion policies, to learn about hunger, disease, life in the favela, inland far from the capitals, in places forgotten with forgotten people. But how does this understanding happen? Understand hunger, without ever feeling; the disease without ever getting sick; forgetfulness without ever being forgotten. All I can understand are my experiences, the rest are suggestions, meanings, acquired through reports, films, series and criticisms of consumerism. And even if whoever suffers will write about it, I did not live, so I hardly identify myself.

What makes me sick is that I am more in the President’s speech, I am more in ‘’ so what, than in contesting the speech, I learned that goods have value, my life has value, as if it were of a different race. I was taught the distance between the “good guy” and the “bad guy”, in the afternoon newspapers if I can call them that, a gentleman in a suit yells loudly, “good bad guy is dead bad guy”, and it is always the black man and the poor man going to prison. It makes it a spectacle of fear and humor to arrest people, yes people, who by the look of the lens become objects, abject in relation to me, distancing me, making me alien, not for forcing me to think like this, but for being conniving. Everything that does not directly affect me, does not cause me revolt, I do not identify myself, I treat myself as “so what” disguised as “what an injustice”, “this country has no way”.

I go to my average job, with average people, trying to pay for their children’s college, trying to pay the bills and I disgust these people, just as I disgust myself. Poor them, pity me, we carry the Bible in speech, we find ourselves in self-help books is very Robins selling healing. Love yourself, know yourself, belong.

For me, it is necessary to understand, not by the idea itself, not by the belief itself, but by the image and similarity. From then on, being disgusted, disgusted, for being exactly what he is, the image of chronological social hypocrisy.