Wanderlino
Arruda
On returning from Salvador, my
daughter Wladenia, anxiously delivers
me, as a gift from my dear friend,
Ângelo Soares Neto, a large,
bulky bundle of newspapers from
old Bahia state, with which I
hopefully could catch up on a
varied number of interests that
were currently spinning within
the orbit of my attention. Knowing
me well enough, Angelo knew how
to locate in the northeastern
and “Baiano” press,
much news of topics that fall
under our common interests and
which, of course, pleased me immensely.
A treasure of rich reading that
would fill in the few tight moments
of leisure left to me during my
endless days of study. I reminisced
about those fascinating days during
the decade of the fifties, when
the short story writer Haroldo
Livio and I would meet every afternoon
at the public county library,
to read…in the fleeting
moments of our modest coffee breaks.
But, however few and quick they
were, we learned much during those
short magical intervals, especially
about literature.
Well
then, dear reader, I won´t
allow myself to stray too far
from the main theme. Now, Angelo
and Haroldo had a fascinating
common interest; their great passion
for the Middle Ages, a subject
that I chose for today´s
topic. I really only brought it
up to start conversation going
but it was just great, because
when you stop to think about it,
both of them, Angelo and Harold,
have a lot of the medieval in
their different ways of being
and acting…And why the middle
ages? Well, are we, or are we
not citizens of the twenty-first
century? Do we not live in the
breathtaking new age, when modernity
invades our everyday lives, when
the young want at any price, to
shake off the heavy dust, manacles
of the past? It is the “to
be or not to be”. That is
the question that we found in
the newspapers that Angelo sent
me: The world is really receding
back to the middle ages!
Who
affirms that the world is once
again approaching the middle ages,
crawling back sideways, like a
crab, is the professor Cid Teixeira,
in an interview to the “Jornal
da Bahia”. He says that
the state in its cabinet can no
longer protect the citizen on
the street, and basically for
this reason alone, we are living
in an age almost feudal, when
the basic, physical protection
of individuals hardly exists.
In truth, the individual either
protects himself, by himself,
or faces the consequences, modernly
putting up bars and walls around
himself as substitutes for castle,
armor, shield and moat…Myriad
laws, unending legal red tape,
too many statistics, an enormous
universe of initials, with all
essential planning planned backwards
and a gigantic non-functional
security system network which
provokes an insecurity even greater.
The individual then commences
building sturdy, high walls with
shards of glass cemented in on
top, electric fences and closed
condominiums, hiding themselves
behind electronic shields, hiring
private, security guards, putting
up closed circuit cameras everywhere,
always putting more and more locks
on doors and windows, rarely going
out in the evening and nevermore
strolling about casually, in the
relaxed and unworried fashion
as in yesteryear. Rich or plebian,
miserable or middle class, the
individual no longer trusts government
protection, coming to the point
of it appearing to be that the
government has just simply disencumbered
itself from this sticky and difficult
obligation.
To
the contrary of what we have always
visualized about the modernizing
of the world, with real protection
for the rights of every person,
with liberty of thought and speech,
the institution of good, respect
and security, the opposite is
seen. The state impersonally creates
a caste of insensitive technocrats,
living robots whose greatest desire,
it seems to me, is to become powerful,
sort of like latter-day Egyptian
pharaohs. At the very bottom of
this, says Sid Teixeira is the
secret wish of every technocrat
to be a high-priest of the Egyptian
god Amom, a keeper of hermetic
sciences and retainer of divine
right and the power that it accompanies.
Having the necessary commands,
programs and pawns of potent computers
at their disposal, speaking the
steely coded language of the economist,
accessible only to themselves,
they permanently enclose themselves
in carpeted air conditioned cabinets,
in plush first class seats on
gleaming streamlined jets and
in lush hotel suites. In truth,
what the technocrats have actually
been able to do is to dissolve
the individual identity of each
and every person, creating a faceless
crowd of formless and impotent
vassals!
If
we continue regressing in this
manner toward the darkness of
past medieval times, patiently
losing our God-given power of
decision day by day, we will soon
become slaves and not full partners
of the having and doing of our
existence. Besides all this, private
companies lose sixty percent of
their earnings in the form of
taxes demanded by our government.
Technology has transformed itself
into the walls of stone that isolate
us, as if we were on a deserted
island of castles in centuries
of darkness.
