Woman dies trying to change the world by shouting

A woman I knew died because she could not control her nerves. On the morbid night, she argued until she lost her breath, recorded the fight on her cellphone, went to the hospital in an ambulance, and her heart stopped. Her name became a gravestone. For a lifetime, she could not heal from neurosis.

I feel a sad pity when I remember her, and the role she plays in this story. To be remembered, imagine, for the deadly degree of obstinacy, for taking to its ultimate consequences the stubbornness of conforming the world outside her to the world inside her. She failed miserably.

Politics reminds me of that behavior, in a good sense and a bad one. Good when we want better individual patterns to be expanded to our families and communities. Very bad when our world is garbage and we want to validate it at any price.

The elections will not bring us the peace we seek so tirelessly (even though we apparently act in the opposite direction most of the time). Lula and Bolsonaro are, let us say, spokespeople for messages we hold in order to have something to say, defend, be outraged about. And then what?

Our political vortex would need to stop being a vortex and become a fresh air that eases life in community. Cultural life, in which politics lies, exists so that we protect ourselves from the forces of nature, and to shame the lazy.

As for those of us who work, there would be little in others’ lives that interested us other than the choice of psychic or marital characters, or variations. Yet we make ourselves hostages of our violence, and we have no solution to the phenomenon. We are like a controversial God.

This little animal that lives inside each of us, this primitive memory wants to bite, tear apart, kill, wants to argue until dying of the heart. Our peace cannot depend on politics, nor on medicine, nor on philosophy. Peace, I think, is very much like faith.