I don’t feel safe
The second round starts in a few days and I don’t feel safe.
I started this blog 4 years ago, exactly because I didn’t feel safe. Bolsonaro was riding the wave of fake news, misogyny, homophobia and fear of communism. Until that moment, few things had scared me more than seeing loved ones confuse Bolsonaro’s truculence and aggressiveness with honesty. Smart people, manipulated into believing that Bolsonaro was an outsider, a non-politician, even though he’s been a deputy for more than 27 years. Good and well-meaning people, choosing with open eyes to vote for someone who has always preached violence and admired torturers.
The military dictatorship became cool, the colors of the flag decorated a conservative carnival and the STF ( Federal Court of Justice) became a pariah. Pariah, not for its incompetence, as Bolsonaro has always preached, but for being one of the only obstacles against a military coup. The extreme right grew up fueled by the most unbelievable fears, such as the “dick bottle” and the secret “PT Marxist plan”. Elections have the power to make ridicule a serious matter.
It’s tragic, but it’s still comical. Fear of communism endures decades after the end of the Cold War, side by side with fear of antichrist, gay dictatorship and the end of the traditional family. That says a lot about the good citizen.
Intellectual dishonesty is the only explanation for a traditional family to convince itself that, by discriminating against a certain public, it will be able to prevent their children, grandchildren, or even spouses, from revealing themselves to be homosexuals, transsexuals and everything else that the good citizen abhors.
Intellectual dishonesty also explains police officers who support civilian access to firearms, as if all these weapons that invade Brazilian homes were not an even greater risk to the security forces themselves.
It goes without saying, but intellectual dishonesty is also the only explanation for religious people to support the explicit violence of Bolsonarist speeches, which would never be approved by any prophet.
The second round inherits this herd reasoning that started four years ago, added to a pandemic and the real risk of democracy being extinct in Brazil. But what will really decide this impasse is the same as in any election: what does the voter get?
Everyone wants more than they have and they protect what little they have achieved as best they can. This means that no one wins an election by promising more taxes, on the contrary, it is necessary to offer something advantageous and easy to digest.
Bolsonaro offers firearms, which inflates the imagination of the good citizen who wants to be more than he is. Weapons were created to empower the weak and tip the balance. Anyone who wants a gun is not interested in equality, but in power. Perhaps not even real power, the illusion of power, is enough.
Lula offers income distribution, which scares the rich and chills the middle class. It should be enough to win an election, but clearly it isn’t. It is not, because, contrary to what the fake news of the “school without a party” preached, class consciousness is not taught in schools. Poor people don’t know they are poor and the middle class believes they are rich because they paid for an iPhone. This is how the (old but gold) white HB20 with green and yellow hood was born.
Brazil has become rich in recent decades, which has not made the country more aware of itself. That’s not how wealth works. Wealth enchants and marvels, it eludes and nourishes ideals of grandeur. Every time the good citizen changes his car, he finds himself closer to the speedboat and the jet he always dreamed of. It is this mentality that has made Brazil a society of the premium poor, standard luxury, brigadeiro gourmet. The poor on the right.
The good citizen is not attracted to fighting poverty, which will not bring him any personal achievement. On the other hand, a firearm in the waist makes the ego soar. Similarly, police violence is sold as justice, which explains not only the support of conservative families for this flawed model of public security, but also Bolsonaro’s fetish for torturers.
Conservative or not, how can anyone feel safe knowing that their neighbors voted for Bolsonaro and that many of them have a firearm on their bedside table? (And believe in things like secret Marxist plans and dick bottles?) I don’t and this blog is my way of keeping sane. It’s like facing violence with carnations, but without the same poetry.
The second round is near and I would like to say with certainty that Lula’s victory will end Bolsonarism, but the fifty million votes that Bolsonaro won in the first round, even after four years of truculent, shameful and unprepared government, will continue to haunt our days.
The illegal mining, the Salles herd ( Salles was environment minister) and the scrapping of universities can even be undone, but their damage will be a scar that doesn’t go away. Hate has never been so well repressedand weakening it can take generations.
I bet on Lula’s victory, attentive to the next Bolsonaro that will emerge. No longer this weird and incompetent version, but someone who will hide the hate he spreads with rhetoric and pretty words.
I bet on Lula’s victory, but I don’t feel safe, because the weapons that Bolsonaro has spread will remain on the bedside tables.
For those who don’t remember Bolsonaro from 2018, I wrote about him at:
