May 25, 2023 at 10:37 p.m.
To read with: “Takeover” by Jay-Z
With the story of Pedro and the Wolf we learned that nothing can be taken too seriously, especially if it wears the bad taste of repetition.
As long as I remember and since I was born, the world is in crisis. In that state we learned to express ourselves and interact, to decipher the rules and manage to —at the end of the day— return home, somewhat dragged, but wake up the next day to inhabit a similar story.
The crisis in this country and in the world has gone beyond an episode, it has become part of our identity: we know its mechanism, we are familiar with its essence and we would hardly understand the world without it. Or does anyone suspect what the crisis-free world would be like?
The crisis that nobody sees anymore
A crisis has to scare. As a child, when my parents repeated at the table the different classifications of crises that the newscasts decreed (exchange, oil, trans-exenal and, of course, matrimonial), the best thing to do was to take their minds to one of their rescued refuges. Not because there was an understanding of the term, but because of the gestures and grimaces with which they referred to that critical moment.
Very soon I understood that sheltering myself was not entirely useful in a space in which the norm was to walk in crisis. Yes, in the same way that one walks in fashion, we put on the crisis without even noticing it. Loose, colorful and expressing through catwalks and avenues, what we are broken from.
“Crisis,” the word, has become normalized in vocabulary as well as behavior and social norm. What’s wrong with lying to a people? Why would one care if he steals from the public purse? Why would you have to mislead someone, see that you are biased in the delivery of justice? Small dishonest actions trigger crises like an alert protocol that curiously no one sees or interprets. And so they pass, six-year term after six-year term.
Haste: the crudest betrayer of a state of crisis?
A reality that does not appear on TV and there is no way to like it, is the one that we replicate in turns and over which we wave our hands to try to shape its direction and daily intention.
We have become so sophisticated as to classify all kinds of crises (and not for the sake of an effective response). But this is how we go, like the king of the jungle among its lianas, from a crisis of credibility, to a crisis of governability, partisan, popularity, environmental, mobility, to a crisis of reality in which what is seen as to be ignored is ignored. justify the way in which one acts and speaks.
What has to happen to detach us from the crises? Could it be that they are inherent to the human state and we had not realized it? Could we then use the terms reality and crisis interchangeably?
Lost of purpose, the species rushes to think that this is how it is being productive. Life has extremely incoherent episodes: there are seasons that do not respond to anything other than nonsense and passages in which one would pause, as an act of clinging. But we rush and even raise agile theories and methodologies that are of no use if they do not have a sense of purpose.
If a crisis makes people turn to see the other with curiosity and interest and even become indignant and protest; if it allows society to find that only in an organized way does it have a sense of individual and group progress; if it helps you find values you share with others, then the crisis state, however acute or superficial, is likely to represent a pivot to developing a sense of drive even deeper and more relevant than the trigger itself.
If not, then it will be just another crisis.
