Propagating my citizenship intervention

 

I've never been one to play or watch games. When I was little, before I was seven, I would go on my father's back to Futebol Clube do Porto games. He liked them very much. I always liked him a lot. From my father. From an early age, I learned to value the joy of others. And noticing the sadness, scrutinizing the enamel smiles, how they avoid other people's compassion, forced by themselves to hide, sometimes the illness, other times the fear, the shame, the lack, the hunger and the absence of freedom. We learn about others, I'll tell you how, by looking closely at others, liking them, taking an interest in them, studying their gestures, details, their gaze, the nuance of their voice, the haughtiness or humility with which they hide or reveal themselves. Humans are easy to get to know. Animals know them well. And they also learn from them, playing the same game. Some lose everything in games, those that are behavioral and addictive. Others make their living in the sayings. Others even beg the casino guards or security guards not to allow them to enter, that their addiction is stronger, that misfortune follows them there, that they have mercy and stop them from going to these rooms and I remember Las Vegas, through the films that came to me, that these rooms here started as pinball machines and so, that they were initially places to kill idleness and meet people. The people who learned to get lost in deviant behavior on television, just recently aired a summary report, in two sentences, inglorious and probably untrue. Which is like saying, statistics, but the ones who understand this are economists and of course, the arithmeticians of statistics who measure these behaviors regulated by samples that want to prove a certain fact. And the fact, now, is confirmed. Drugs and alcohol, the institute that measures them refers, in its figure of the president, that in the past, as if to say, a long time ago, there were more smokers, there were more alcoholics, there was more aggression, there was more rock n' roll, but Negreiros, a professor of deviant behavior, who I read when I was at university, contradicts the decrease in consumption, which has been increasing over time, he said this in 2004, but on TV they say no, what has increased is the consumption of online games, that has decreased the consumption of tobacco, that has increased the consumption of psychoactive painkillers and that has decreased the consumption of weed and hashish. The consumption of fast food must have increased because it is fashionable, Coca-Cola, in short, all the soft drinks that cool our senses, that numb our soul. And I say that hard drugs are consumed by the elite who find a way to acquire them, that soft drugs are more accessible and if they are less consumable, let's use the expression of normalization, it is because more and more sellers of these easily accessible drugs are arrested and the excessive consumption of cheap, homemade and legal drinks increases and, increasingly, if it weren't for road safety during periods of anniversaries and events that are present, we would have many more deaths and accidents to mourn, many more women dying at home, many more adults and innocent people dying from natural causes, from heavy drinking, on the exits of highways around the world. Because living in deeply moralistic societies based on excessive precariousness does not combat anomalies, family dysfunctions, where having the goal of emigrating or imploding are not choices, violence grows and is learned and generates more of the same, we cannot delude ourselves, and I am not just talking about nights, weekends, I am talking about the escapism that people resort to in order not to die depressed between hunger and war, of drugs produced in pharmacies, we are all drugged with antidepressants, which is what is good for selfishness and gout, for zone and mycosis, it must be great for the competition of massive influencers, who simply demonstrate a clear, obvious and massive emptying of future projects committed and pledged yesterday and today, where there is no room for dreaming, having goals of creating companies, being creative, what a shame, what a dishonor to the family to be an actor or anything else, it is better to be a softie, better to be sensible, quiet, depressed and frustrated, because that, yes, gives you calluses and origin of our human performance, have patience to catch and keep quiet, without having to pay taxes that support royalty (privileged royalties), of not being able to buy, rent, lease, only by sharing, houses, apartments, housing incentives, share the pain with a cup in hand and a shoulder that understands, because there goes the same thing, in a clear identification, transversal, unfortunately, where only the top of the range, allow the jargon, can get out of the mud, or get stuck there, to know what it's like, to experience the alarm of being marginalized, which must be fashionable, must be top, to be part of the unemployment market, as Deolinda sings, how foolish we all are, and the mold of moralism exceeding itself and disguising itself as fads and populisms, to scare away the truth. In fact, we are products and producers of precariousness when we allow lies to progress in the social and political models that represent us. There is no way around the snowball of apathy and complacency, of functionalism and the bourgeoisie. Save all the sacristy rats, the hysteria of the new man who, repeating a lie a thousand times, swears that we will give birth to the truth. I started the text to talk about myself and I end up talking about everything and anything that gets in my way, that escapes my mouth for the true and raw, for the naked and far from appearances, immediate consumer society, between revealing and admitting, or keeping quiet and pushing it away because someone will come and clean up the mess we make, one of these days. There is no coherence, there is no interest in changing, what matters is to cheer people up, what matters, man, is to let them forget, that people are stupid, they only criticize and don't complicate things, they keep quiet while they use kid gloves to produce these verbs to fill up like hotspots and achieve shares, like being better and bigger than the other, they teach themselves to compete and not think, or out of politeness to keep quiet, shut the hell up, it's better to say it every day, shout if necessary, but keeping quiet is being an accomplice of a Machiavellian system, to maintain and fatten the empty and vacuous lie, that parades in the shopping centers of Massamá or Alfena, it doesn't matter, it's all the same problem, hiding doesn't solve the tip of anything, it only sinks us and deludes us about the future, to increase mental illness, to build, for the kids we create, the root of evil. Instead of educating to cooperate, it is to compete, it sounds much more chic, designer! Let envy grow among the poor and let projects abound in small things and cunning, because that way we are all safer, them and us, in "hanging" life in short pauses and without making a fuss, let salaries be increased to buy employees, let voluntarism be attributed and everything be changed in that inversion that Neptune will eat for breakfast, which in Spanish, I believe, is desayuno, to rhyme with the misfortune of the lack of verticality. 

I started the text to talk about justice with you, because I consider myself a victim of schemes, but the underlying fertilizer is the same, covering the mess of the dilemma with luxury carpets. That there is class, family and furniture cooperativism, but no systemic empathy! With our mouth, our eyes, our ears, we show that we are here, with the broom we clear it from view, in a rancid and moralistic "avant-garde" way, to hide, we disguise the violence that is growing before our eyes. We are artists of the cup, it doesn't surprise me at all that instead of people we have dolled-up machines replacing us in the restaurant, in the supermarket, in the car (even now it's dispensary), in the breeze on the highway. And that true artists resign from the cast, from the stages we inhabit, by mistake. Three minutes of fame, go on, it will earn him from now until he puts on his pajamas, because tomorrow we will see if the boy has learned cues that compensate for the beers and the image posts that on Tik Tok give the country a stock of imbeciles by the bucketload! The craze for denying evidence has taken over the lives of the Portuguese! We are the same herd, it is not the kids' fault, it is ours, for keeping quiet and consenting to the lie that was produced. I've smoked a few joints and I can assure you that you have to have some nerve, to say that bronze is silver, that an ounce of gold is worth 2900 euros, wouldn't it be a case of exporting ounces in exchange for wisdom and builders of a new reality, without masks, without beliefs, without rats or sacristy nuns? It would be fun, it would be!

I end the text by saying only what I intended at the beginning. Because the innocent pay for the guilty, because violence is hidden and bought in closed-door dinner deals, because of connections and bribes, the scoundrels are being produced, and there will still be an accident, which I foresee, guessed in my crystal ball, and the state will have to pay for my funeral procession, so as not to file trials for domestic violence lightly, so as not to create surreptitious and not very transparent mechanisms to encourage people to become artists in the art of fraud and deception. The terrain is ripe for populists and for the extreme condition of producing hypocrisy like soap! As Mário de Sá Carneiro used to say and as Trovante sang, when I die, beat the taxis, arrest the tansos, because I want to go by donkey! That day, when you see me in a box, don't cry or be mean, you'll send me a fax about the sick state of the country, to see if I'll come back and strike you with some lightning, before Neptune ruins it all, or Trump, with his bullshit heroics, starts arming himself with turtles!

Mario de Sá-Carneiro

End - When I Die

When I die

Knock on cans,

Break out with leaps and bounds

Crack whips in the air

Call clowns and acrobats.

Let my coffin go on a donkey

Andalusian-style outfit:

Nothing is denied to a dead man,

And I really want to go by donkey…