By ALEXANDRE ARAGÃO DE ALBUQUERQUE*
How long will Brazil be led by a fool who doesn't know that gunpowder is a Chinese invention?
There is a famous popular saying that goes like this: “who is silent, consents”. In Maranhão, he pejoratively called the Maranhão people fagots. In a public speech at the Planalto Palace, he attacked all Brazilian men and women who are concerned with defending life, calling them sissies. And finally, for the umpteenth time, he framed the journalistic class by calling them “vultures”. Will there be a reaction from those attacked? What kind of reaction will companies and communication professionals manifest? What forces authorize him to act with such disrespect? Do finance capital and ruralist capital endorse this criminal policy?
Everyone knows that he doesn't have the gunpowder to face the largest war arsenal in the world, much less the Armed Forces of generals Villas Bôas and Sérgio Etchegoyen who have supported him since the first minute of this pathetic presidency. But saliva to gloat over the Brazilian population, he spouts it daily. Especially when he finds himself harassed due to the misdeeds of his son “Zero Um” together with the financial operator Fabrício Queiroz, both denounced by the Public Ministry of Rio de Janeiro (MP-RJ) for embezzlement, money laundering, embezzlement and criminal organization (gang) for a crack scheme. Based on breaches of bank and tax secrecy, the MP-RJ claims that “Zero Um” used at least R$2,7 million in cash from the gang's scheme. This is just the first chapter of the plot.
The thought of the classics helps us because they are the ones who always have something to say to us, because when thinking, they gave us something to think about, mainly in the way they faced the questions of their time and offered answers to them, teaching us to interrogate our own time. Ignorance is a demon, to use the theological grammar so fashionable in recent times, capable of developing many tragedies. The greatest ancient Greek poets were right to represent in theatrical dramas the tragic fate imputed to those ignorant of the reality of facts.
Freedom is power, it is self-determination, it is autonomy of action in the face of the need that presents itself to us in the present time. Freedom opposes the passivity of accepting that external forces determine our destinies. Freedom is to determine ourselves by the inner need to be what we want to be. Do we want to be a people led by a sadist who vibrates for the deaths of 162 Brazilians? By an ignorant man who is incapable of assessing the consequences of his words and his public gestures? For an unprepared person who doesn't know how to deal with international politics? By a fool who doesn't know that gunpowder is a Chinese invention?
In Nature nothing happens by chance; in politics as well. It is high time that Freedom made it happen to change this state of affairs.
*Alexandre Aragão de Albuquerque Master in Public Policy and Society from the State University of Ceará (UECE).
