I am just a brazilian high-school teacher and a less than minor scholar. I am Nothing, even Less-than-Nothing. I am Nobody and Everyman at once.
I am mostly and deeply the father of two dead babies, Miguel and Luiz Miguel. Here I wage my skin and my soul on the game - I humbly beg you to listen my poor voice.
From the depths of sorrow I scream to you: hear the cry of a grieving father. I know in flesh, blood, heart and tears the limits of mankind. All the knowledge of Science and the might of Technology were not enough to save my stillborn children.
We are little more than smart apes with dellusions of grandeur. We are kids playing with knives, chainsaws and guns. We are as mortal and frail as were our Paleolithic ancestors, although we fool ourselves into believing we are demi-gods.
Now we are living and dying through our very own darkest hour. A miserable, invisible, microscopic virus is creeping and crawling among us, sneaking and preying our flesh with sharp teeth and claws. It takes much, much less than a tiger or a shark to tear a human being apart.
We are trembling in our houses, afraid of this vírus, as did our ancestors in their caves of the sabretooth lurking around. As the arrogant son of Daedalus soared the skies, we visited the moon - and we might fall as well. We may shout as Ajax on his rock and be crushed by the same lightining. Hybris always has its price.
The Lisbon earthquake in mid-eighteenth century made all the thinkers of Enlightenment dread and dream of a world where Man would be master of all things. We have been living for and through this dream and it looks more and more like a nightmare.
In the wake of Industrial Revolution we phantasized Science and Technology, like a magical cornucopia, could serve us a dazzling and endless supply of pleasures, delights and entertainment. For some of us, it really did and does.
As Dr. Faust, we accepted the mephistophelic bargain, and now we pay with our bodies, lives and souls.
We bargained and bartered the most precious treasures we hold, Time and Life, for expendable gadgets we soon enjoy and forget even sooner. We trade our precious Time to acquire vane, ludicrous and evanescent pleasures that barely fulfill the boredom of our lives. We run, and run, and run to win plastic medals of no worth.
We live busy and futile lives, accomplishing ridiculous and empty conquests. Our hearts are wastelands. Paraphrasing Henri Bergson, almost one century ago, we buy fancy hats to cover the void of our heads.
We eat, and yet we starve. There is a hunger inside us, and an unquencheable thirst. We struggle and agonize, tortured by our ever growing and unfulfilled desires. We live like mad dogs chasing cars.
This hunger is so cruel that it compells us to prey upon ourselves and our earth, water and air. We are unsatiable predators, devouring everything ahead of us and leaving a trail of putrid feces behind us, until the bitter day we should eat the very feces we once left behind - and then, finally, submerge, drown and choke in those feces. And thus, after wasting our precious Time, we destroy our irreplaceable Life.
Time and Life are so precious because they are unique. There is no way to recover the Time we spent and the Life we lost. No scientist, no engineer, no physician, no banker, no industrialist, no president, no king, no emperor can give back my two babies. They were unique and precious, and they are forever gone. Forever gone, as my grandpa, my grandma, my uncle, my dad-in-law and so many people I held and still hold so dear.
In her last two years, I used to visit my grandma every Saturday, and spend the day along with her and our family. Each of those Saturdays are now sacred memories for me. I can remember her head leaning on the couch, napping after lunch. It was beautiful to comtemplate the rest of that old head, battle hardened and weather beaten. Her soft snoring sounded like a symphony. Victor Hugo was right when he said there are few sights more beatiful than the sleep of the babies and the elderly.
My gradma was born 1926, in Agostinho Porto, a poor village of Rio de Janeiro State. She and her siblings used to gather coal from the railway, to spare the coal needed to cook - they harvested the leftovers of the passing "progress". There was no fridge at home. No radio, no TV. The table never missed bread, but she was an adult when she tasted the sweetness of chocolate for the first time. She was 10 when her mother died giving birth to her younger brother. She left the school to take care of home and siblings. They were poor, hard working people, but not miserable. They brushed their teeth with soap, because toothpaste was then too expensive in Brazil. She survived, she thrived and lived a long life, with its moments of joy and sorrow.
As a kid and teenager I had modest luxuries my grandma and her siblings could not even dream of at the same age - I had many toys, chocolate, books, comic books, my own K7 player... My mother grew to be a person of simple tastes and so I strive to be. I work just enough to earn a living and have some time to my family, friends, books, movies and games.
I am a person really easy to please. True joy is free. Stare the sky and feel the the breeze in a starry night is free. Kiss my wife is free. Cuddle my little dog is free. Talk with good friends is free. Laughter is free. Remember my napping grandma is free. All those great delights are free! Free! They cost me only the precious Time I did not barter for money.
I can afford myself this precious Time, first and foremost, because I avoid debts. The modern worker is locked, chained and drown by debts - for utmost delight of bankers and other financial predators. Sixteenth century traveller Jean de Léry compared bankers to cannibals eating the flesh and chewing the bones of orphans and widows - it is not a bad analogy. For the salaried employee, debt is sold as freedom, but ends like unending slavery. It is a trap.
Debts. What for? Conspicuous consumption to fulfill foolish desires. A new TV, a shiny smartphone, a sleek car, a travel made almost exclusively to post pictures on social networks. A few expendable gadgets and some days of leisure that wind up to months, if not years, of growing and crushing debts. Nothing but expensive hats to cover empty heads and hungry hearths.
But all those luxuries have an even higher price. All those expendable TVs, smartphones and cars - unfortunately - do not grow on trees. Au contraire, many trees happen to be cut for those gadgets to be made. Mines are dug, wild life is killed, rivers are poisoned, air is polluted to manufacture all those useless items of consumption that sooner or later (rather sooner) end up in the garbage.
Centuries old trees are killed to give us a puny smartphone that will be discarded six months later. Trading centuries for months is not smart at all. We can build a factory in months, but years are needed for a tree to grow and thrive from a tiny little seed. An enterprise may go bankrrupt in months, but a good tree will give (not sell) oxygen for years. It will offer shadow for people and shelter for animals. Few things in this planet are at once worthier and cheaper than a tree. But we do not usually think so. A living tree means no Money, but dead wood, cut in logs and planks, can reach a good price in the right markets.
And so, precious Time is spent to kill worthy Life. We trade priceless treasures for cheap merchandise and meaningless consumption. What a stupid bargain! We are not even very smart apes, after all.
Right now, there are billionaire apes (and some poorer, too) grumbling that we should abandon quarantine and hand over some human lives to save "the economy" - wich mostly means their own assets and patrimony. Those billionaires are simply telling us that we should make human sacrifices to appease the hungry god Money. It is a dreadful, pitiful and cynical reenactement of true human sacrifices made by foregone cultures in a real context of worship and devotion. This capitalist clergy deserves the same title given to their precursors centuries ago by Jean de Léry: cannibals eating the flesh and drinking the blood of orphans and widows. For such people, human lives are just fuel to keep the engine of economy moving to nowhere. It is, quite literally, "cut-throat capitalism".
From decades now, scientists have been alerting from the dangers of "super-viruses" emerging from devastated forests and shrinking wildlife habitats, which tend to become overpopulated brewing cauldrons for viruses to replicate and mutate times and times again, eventually giving birth to powerful and deadlier new strains. When you trade trees for smartphones, logging and mining can favor the emergency of such viruses as undesired byproducts. Human action in large scale usually has unintended and unpredictable consequences. And the scales are large, since a stomach has limits, but bank accounts do not.
Social inequality is another ally of such viruses. In many african and asian countries and cities, people must rely on "wet markets" to eat animal protein. Those markets cannot afford to offer proper sanitary conditions, as there are few (if any) fridge chambers available. Wild and domesticated animals are kept alive in those confined and overcrowded spaces and butchered on spot, making wet markets the perfect environment for the brewing of viroses, exchange between species and subsequent outbreak. Indeed, COVID-19 began to spread in the wet market of Wuhan - and from there it reached people all over the world - including rich people in the world greatest megalopolis, wearing expensive suits and eating the finest meats in nice restaurants. The virus is not picky on which humans to prey at; it just do it, anywhere, anytime, wherever possible.
The outline of the situation is relatively simple. In a few years we had minor, local epidemies, and terrible ones, like Ebola, SARS, H1N1, and now dreadful COVID-19. If we keep destroying forests, and people in poorer countries continue to have denied their right to eat properly handled food, we may expect more and more epidemics and pandemics in the years and decades to come - even quicker and deadlier ones. It is the matter nightmares are made off.
The more we devastate to consume, the harder environmental hazards will hit back. When we prey upon nature, we prey upon ourselves. We are nature and nature is us, after all. WE ARE MEAT -australian philosopher Val Plumwood discovered it the hardest of ways, surviving a crocodile attack. But this self-evident reality is hard for us to accept, as Plumwood notes:
In Western thinking [...] the human is set apart from nature as radically other. Religions like Christianity must then seek narrative continuity for the individual in the idea of an authentic self that belongs to an imperishable realm above the lower sphere of nature and animal life. The eternal soul is the real, enduring and identifying part of the human self, while the body is animal and corrupting. [...] It seems to me that in the human supremacist culture of the West there is a strong effort to deny that we humans are also animals positioned in the food chain. This denial that we ourselves are food for others is reflected in many aspects of our death and burial practices. The strong coffin, conventionally buried well below the level of soil fauna activity, and the slab over the grave to prevent any other thing to dig us up, keeps the Western human body from becoming food for other species. Horror movies and stories also reflect this deep-seated dread of becoming food for other forms of life: Horror is the wormy corpse, vampires sucking blood, and alien monsters eating humans. Horror and outrage usually greet stories of other species eating humans. Even being nibbled by leeches, sandflies, and mosquitoes can stir various levels of hysteria. [...] The idea of human prey threatens the dualistic vision of human mastery in which we humans manipulate nature from outside, as predators but never prey.
As Stanley Milgram proposed decades ago, we live in a small world and it gets smaller every day. We share this planet as our common house. In a healthy house you can't expect to have a pretty dinning room and a filthy kitchen and get good food at the table. Right now, so to speak, Wuhan is the kitchen, the table is at Wall Street and COVID-19 is on the menu. We must take good care of our entire house, if we want to live well and safe in it.
Now the world is almost completely under quarantine. This time, environment stroke us so hard that we were obliged to take an unwilling and bitter halt.
We are scared and annoyed, but reports from around the world tell us air and water are cleaner in many places. We are strong, but nature is even stronger. A few weeks of slowing down are giving the environment a chance of heal some wounds.
If we are willing to learn a lesson from all this fear and suffering, is that not only we can slow down, as we should slow down - for our own good.
After all, we are surviving.
We can live and thrive with much less - as did my grandma.
We can have meaningful lives with less consumption. We can enjoy all those real joys that are free - since we give ourselves Time.
We can fill our heads with meaningful thoughts and part ways with the fancy, expensive and ridiculous hats. We can share our dreams with our children and our parents. We can have all that is priceless and make our lives worth living.
Right now, we have the chance to break this perverse cycle of consuption, debt, exhaustion and destruction.
We can dream and pave the road away from this busy and meaningless nightmare. We can build the bridges to another, brighter future. We can fly away from the tirany of numbers, production goals. We can regain mastery over our foolish desires and let all Life be lived and loved.
It will not be easy. Many interests are at stake. We have within our very selves this hunger for more, and more, and more.
We should consume less and work less.
We should share more equally the product of our efforts. We should rightfully acknowledge the worth of so many workers that are so essential and so underpaid. We should show our gratitude and respect for the garbage men that keep our streets healthy, for the janitors that clean our schools and hospitals, for the humble farmer that supply our tables and all those workers whose contribution to our lives is underestimated and unrewarded.
We should challenge the billionaires that earn so much and share so little. They can live with some billions less - and they must do so. They need us much more than we need them. We must occupy Wall Street again and again, until that 1% understand we exist. Who they think they are? We are all humans, living and suffering in this planet we share.
We should stop worshipping god Money and appeasing his needs with blood.
We must really care about the people that live through hard times, near or far.
We must acknowledge the true and deep worth of Time and Life.
More than ever, we should strive to build a better Life, but Always keeping in mind the wisdom of Martin Luther King:
But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.And we must also keep in our hearts the words of Gandhi:
I believe that fighting against what is immoral presupposes mental and, therefore, moral opposition. I seek to completely neutralize the sword of the tyrant, not by exchanging it for better steel, but by deceiving his expectation of finding in me a physical resistance. He will find in me a soul resistance that will escape his strength. Such resistance will dazzle him and force him to bow. And the fact of bowing will not humiliate the aggressor, but will praise him.We must remember the gesture of Rosa Parks - by simply refusing to stand up in a bus and remaining on her seat, she ignited a spark that put in motion the Civil Rights Movement. There is great power in those simple attitudes of moral strength.
It is simple to say, but very hard to do, indeed. There are so many questions and so few answers.
The problem has cultural, political and economical dimmensions, all entangled and very complex.
It is not a matter of days or years, but of decades. However, we must begin right now.
The day after the pandemic is the day we must begin to change.
As suggests David Mitchell, we all are only droplets in an ocean - but what is an ocean if not a multitude of droplets? Let us be this powerful ocean.
In solidarity,
Luiz Fabiano Tavares
Brazilian, teacher, historian, human
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