OUTRAGE LTD.

by Guillermo A. Ortega - May 20, 2007

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An African detained by Spaniard police while trying to reach the Canary Islands on his way to Europe.

By the end of last century, after visiting Salvador da Bahia two options were left to anyone: to leave with the promise of coming back soon or to move in immediately. I do ignore if this nice challenge of life still exists because nowadays one finds a cruel city dived in the speculative interests of native and adventurous people whose base is the moral and ethical violence.

A corporate spirit has been rooted in all areas of human activity as a way of protection, even mistreating the weakest persons in defense of one's own interests. To reside in that old and beautiful city demands a real ghetto-lifestyle currently. In other words, one must live isolated in horizontal condominiums or in buildings that look like more with cages, both with strong safety set up.

During decades, Cuba that has lived in solitary confinement forced by USA's economical power, managed to develop a first level model at practicing medicine and public health for everybody since it is an obligation of the state with its citizens. An example for the skunks-face of the other Latin America countries that pretended not to understand what was going on there for fifty years except for Canada and Mexico, the first one a Franco-Saxon country highly civilized in spite of being a neighbor of the USA and the other one a real victim of that proximity that always had a bearable acting in that context but has always been in second and third class patterns. However, both countries were the only ones, to care about the Island even today they maintain a discerning posture toward the American imposition.

To be born poor and later to be promoted to a superior rank thanks to a political force generated by accepting Neoliberalism, Capitalism's malign clone, as a solution for people's life is to have the certainty of being a con twenty four hours a day. As a matter of fact, the saddest part of that experience with young liberal professionals that are getting started at the work market is they are not aware of the transformation they had gone through. They are cons without knowing it.

To study medicine in a traditional university or at the new ones is so costly for the future medical doctor that the exercise of this secular discipline has to have a categorical orientation minded to obtaining the return of the investment applied in the academic graduation: the faster, the better. Understandably, this appetite ends up motivating an arrangement of nuclei of economical power forwarding investments to that section.

As well as in outlying neighborhoods exist extermination groups to uphold businesses at local trade by annihilating the marginal youths that have no future dedicating their short existences - of which they are full aware - to assault and to place the residents' integrity under constant threaten and risk; it has been built recently a private magnum opus that offends the modern representation of Brazil's first capital city.

Some decades ago, I saw similar thing in Las Vegas. The Metro Goldwin Mayer Hotel and Casino was the most grotesque thing in terms of what could be classified as an assumed luxury to the point of confronting the good taste of any human. A group of investors where some very influential director, suffering of a deep inferiority complex, must have decided to build a similar casino here in Salvador da Bahia. I beg your pardon, it is not a casino. I meant a hospital.

Just to imagine the maintenance costs of that Sultan-like hospital drives one to think about the richest Brazilian foundations that are paying their employees' medical treatments. With no doubt the hospital's stratospheric fees impels anyone not to trust in that kind of an investment. To invest with that pattern that intends to be luxury, it only works out at the Arab countries that instead of burning petroleum they have to spend those economical resources in constructing two hundred kilometers of length beaches in order to beautify their tedious life, for instance, Dubai's.

It is a matter of courage. What basis do we have in Latin America to have a hospital as that one located theoretically in a middle class neighborhood where to just a few meters of distance, poverty demonstrates the ignominy of its presence as it has been for the last four hundred years?

Obviously, no one can forbid a person or a group to possess those enormous sums of money. Everyone is entitled of longing for the amount of money he or she wishes to have as well as applying it wherever may wish … But, Hold it! Forget that! If one lives in a city populated in its great majority by people of low purchasing power, in other words, the poor ones that walk along with their beggars; one should not promote and fire up the envy, to pay tribute to the silent hate and to the revolt will for insurrection, to take revenge conscious or unconsciously of the differences imposed vertically from top to bottom. It is necessary to rethink personal attitudes to avoid putting life in risk, unless for some rich ones, who for having so much sex, drinking and drugs they do not give a dime for their lives.

I have always said the Right was obtuse, very obtuse. I have no opinion regarding the Left, because I do not know it well, I do know the Right, I always lived in it. The Right should provide study, school; give a good work to those who need it. Do not rob the perspiration of the weak ones. Did he or she work? Then, pay him or her well, do not thank but pay. Working for free is a slave's thing and, as all know, slavery already ended in the Americas. Why to want to enrich robbing the energies of somebody else? Who was that to establish those plans of behavior that today are detected in a greater part of native entrepreneurs? One has to exfoliate the salary earner in any way. That is over, but here; some insist and do believe that is the only way of making profits.

Some years ago, going to the beach to get some tan was great. A brilliant sun putting a little tropical color on the skin, in other words, a lot of Melanin on the epidermis manufactured intensely and in an urgency regime by the liver. When I was a small boy, dark blue was my skin tone. As an adult, suntan became kind of Jambo color and now at the entrance of the Third Age; I am satisfied with a light brownish tan. Such a trip thanks to the so-called Melanin.

Then, the Schengen Space was created, in other words, the place where the fifteen European countries that abolished the use of visas to travel among them get together. Yes, they are the same Europeans that in the past killed each other and when advancing sea beyond, equally, destroyed what it was not theirs, they plundered the wealth that did not belong to them but to the Indians - who were almost people not to saying animals, according to them. They murdered and decimated people wherever they went with the same fury and violence as that they devoted to themselves. They were in Africa - poor Africa, never stopped suffering - and they also took there feelings of all kinds: hatred, separatism, racism, segregation and became owners until the mineral reservations were already exhausted. Yes, Europeans never were the type of an everlasting-good-feelings-fellows.

Whether for good or for evil, we spoke the languages imposed by their presence and we were educated with values and principles practiced by those gentlemen. We have at the same time the demonstrations of the lowest feelings exercised by those people that here arrived, otherwise see Rio de Janeiro's declared but dissembling civil war.

On the other hand, the empire showing its cruelty, transmitted through electronic media how it bombarded the millenarian Baghdad. This can only confirm abhor spent in that action very characteristic of its people's origin: European, right? Hold it, please, one moment. In fact, all this that I have written about is not exclusiveness of the old continent. That belongs to the human condition. We are a kind of life undergoing a test of experience; we are an experiment that insists on not forgetting its primeval roots for exterminating its neighbor whose presence threatens to take away the stored provisions.

Here appears an inevitable comment on that photograph by Arturo Rodriguez that can be considered the best one of the year. This portrays a poignant condition on both sides: the arrested element almost naked and the white guards using gloves to avoid contamination, the repugnance that provokes the proximity with those undesirable foreigners in European land, easily identifiable by the Melanin presence on the skin. For God's sake, that pigment makes a lot people's life seem like hell. Michael Jackson is right of inhibiting its liver production being then loved as a white fellow by young whites, while the old whites just wait a chance to hang him by his neck but that is another story.

While the world is in the middle of an ebullition stage, time has come for an intense existential reflection because everything is being reformulated, the environment, the habits, the governments' politics, the conscience that people have to be respected, it does not matter the epidermis or racial patterns.

Internet, the new media has modified the conceptual focus of the own existence. Knowledge opens the minds with a never thought speed for instant actions like the one frozen in that picture representing an infamous past that tends to be over, luxurious buildings built to take care of the wealthy candidates' physical health have to be re-classified; the practice of medicine has to be rethought, otherwise, it will precipitate attitudes of hopeless escape toward bestiality.

Though, governments should exist led by prepared, well educated and conscious people who shall assume the mission of mediating those transformations since initially, citizens will have to count with a certain monitoring and father-like-coverage in order to survive. However, everything will depend on each one of us, more than before because it will not be easy. The party is over.