“For almost 50 years the world saw us as a Swiss species, in reality we were bastard children of the British Empire, and when it succumbed we lived the bitter honeys of dire terms of trade and we were stuck longing for the past. We spent 50 years remembering Maracana, our sporting feat. Today we have resurfaced in this Globalized World, perhaps, learning from our pain.
My personal story: that of a boy, because I was once a boy, who like others wanted to change his time and his World after a dream, that of a classless and libertarian society. My mistakes: they are children of my time, I assume them but there are times when I yell at myself: “Who had the strength, from when we were able to drink so much utopia”
However, I do not look back because the real today was born in the fertile ashes of yesterday. On the contrary, I do not live to collect accounts or reverberate memories, I am anguished and in what way the future that I will not see and for which I am committed. Yes, a World with a better humanity is possible, but perhaps today the first task is to save life.
But I am from the South and I come from the South to this assembly. I unequivocally carry the millions of poor compatriots in the cities, in the moors, in the jungles, in the pampas and in the sinkholes of Latin America, a common homeland that is taking over with the crushed native cultures, with the remains of colonialism. in Malvinas, with useless blockades of that alligator under the Caribbean sun called Cuba, it bore the consequences of electronic surveillance that does nothing but sow mistrust that poison us uselessly. I carry a gigantic social debt, with the need to defend the Amazon, the seas, our great rivers of America. I am charged with the duty to fight for the homeland for all and so that Colombia can find the way to peace, and I am charged with the duty to fight for tolerance towards those who are different, and with whom we have differences and disagree, it is not specified tolerance for which we agree. Tolerance is the foundation of being able to live together in peace and understanding that in the world we are different.
The fight against the dirty economy, drug trafficking, swindling and fraud, corruption, contemporary plagues borne by that anti-value, the one that maintains that we are happier if we get rich no matter what.
We have sacrificed the old immaterial gods, and we occupy the temple with the Market God. He organizes the economy, politics, habits, life and even finances us in installments and cards, the appearance of happiness. It would seem that we were born only to consume and consume and when we cannot, we carry frustration, poverty and self-exclusion. The truth today, that to spend and bury debris, the so-called carbon footprint by science, says that if the total humanity aspires to live as an average North American, three Planets would be necessary. That is to say that our civilization mounted a lying challenge and as we are doing, it is not possible for everyone to fulfill this meaning of life that in fact makes our age, directed by accumulation and the Market, mass as a culture.
We promise a life of waste and waste, which constitutes a countdown against nature, and against humanity as the future. Civilization against simplicity, against sobriety, against all natural cycles, but worst, civilization against freedom that takes time to live human relationships, love, friendship, adventure, solidarity, family. Civilization against free time that does not pay and can enjoy scrutinizing nature. We razed the real jungles, and we planted anonymous concrete jungles. We face a sedentary lifestyle with walkers, insomnia with pills, loneliness with electronics. Is it that we are happy away from the eternal human? Stunned, we flee from our Biology that defends life for life itself as a superior cause and we supplant it by functional consumerism to accumulation. Politics, eternal mother of human events, was shackled to the economy and the market.
From jump to jump, politics can only perpetuate itself and as such it delegated power and entertains itself in a daze fighting for the Government. The Human Cartoon is running wild, buying and selling everything and innovating to be able to negotiate the non-negotiable in some way. There is marketing for cemeteries and funeral services, for maternity wards, for fathers, mothers, grandparents, and uncles, including secretaries, cars, and vacations. Everything, everything is business. Still, marketing campaigns deliberately fall on children and their psychology to influence the elderly and have a secured territory for the future. There is plenty of evidence of these abominable technologies that are sometimes frustrating.
The little man of our time wanders between financial institutions and the routine boredom of air-conditioned offices. He always dreams of vacations and freedom. He always dreams of finalizing the accounts, until one day, the heart stops and goodbye.
There will be another soldier covering the jaws of the Market ensuring the accumulation. It is that the crisis is the impotence of politics incapable of understanding that humanity does not escape nor will it escape the feeling of the Nation, because it is almost in our code, but today is the time to fight to prepare a World without borders.
The globalized economy has no other direction than the private interest of very few and each National State looks at its continuity stability and today, the great task for our peoples is the Whole. As if this were not enough, Productive Capitalism is imprisoned in the cash of the banks and these are the pinnacle of World Power.
More clearly: the World screams for global rules that respect the achievements of the Sciences that abound but do not govern for good.
Today it is necessary to define the hours of work, the possible convergence of currencies, how the global fight for water and against desertification is financed, how and what is recycled and how to press against global warming. What are the limits to each task, etc. It would be imperative to achieve great consensus in order to unleash solidarity towards the most oppressed, and to tax waste and speculation. Mobilize the great economies not to create disposables but useful goods without frivolity or calculated obsolescence, to help the Poor World. Useful goods against World Poverty. Much more profitable than waging war is overturning a useful planetary-scale Neo-Keinesianism to abolish the world’s most blatant shame.
Our World needs fewer global organizations of all kinds, which organize Forums and Conferences that only serve hotel chains and airlines and that in the best of cases no one picks up or acts on their decisions. Yes, we need to chew the old and eternal a lot and summon from and with politics to the World of Science that strives for humanity and not to get rich.
With them create agreements for the whole world. Neither the Large National States, nor the transnationals and even less the Financial System, should govern the Human World. Yes, High Politics intertwined with scientific wisdom. That Science that does not want profit, but the future. Intelligence and not interest at the helm of the ship.
Things of this style do not seem essential, but they would require that the determining factor was life and not accumulation. We are not so delusional, these things will not happen, nor others like it. We have many useless sacrifices ahead of us. Today the World is incapable of creating planetary regulation of globalization and this due to the weakening of High Politics (the one that takes care of everything).
For a time we will attend the refuge of more or less regional agreements with a liar Free Trade but that will build protectionist parapets. At the same time, industrial and service branches dedicated to saving the Environment will grow. Thus, we will console ourselves. The accumulation to delight the Financial System will continue undaunted. Wars and therefore fanaticism will continue until nature makes this civilization unviable. Perhaps our vision is too stark and we see man as a unique creature, capable of going against his own species.
I repeat, the ecological crisis of the planet is a consequence of the overwhelming triumph of human ambition, so is its defeat, due to political impotence to fit into another era that we have built without conscience.
The truth is that the population quadrupled and the PIS grew at least twenty times in the last century. Since 1990, world trade has grown by 12% annually, doubling every 6 years. We could continue writing down data on globalization but let’s conclude: we are entering another era rapidly, but with politicians, cultural trappings, parties and young people all old, in the face of the terrifying accumulation of changes. We cannot handle globalization because our thinking is not global, we do not know if it is because of a cultural limit or if we reach biological limits. Our age is portentously revolutionary, as humanity did not know another, but without conscious or simply instinctive leadership. Even less with Organized Political leadership because without even having had a precursor philosophy of importance. The greed that so pushed material, technical and scientific progress, paradoxically plunges us into a misty abyss. A time without history and we are left without eyes or collective intelligence to continue colonizing and perpetuate transforming ourselves. It seems that things take autonomy and subdue men. On one side or another, there are plenty of glimpses to glimpse the course but it is impossible to collectivize great decisions for the Whole. Individual greed triumphs over the superior greed of the species. Let us clarify: what is the All for us? The global life of the Earth System including human life with all the fragile balances that make it possible to perpetuate ourselves.
On the other hand, the Republics were born to affirm that men are equal, that no one is more than anyone else, that their governments should represent the common good, justice and equity. They are often deformed and forgotten by ordinary people. The Republics were not built to vegetate on top of the Gray, but on the contrary, they are a functional part of it and are therefore due to the majority.
Due to feudal reminiscences or dominating classism or consumer culture, the Republics in their directions adopt a splendid and exclusive daily life in the deeds of the common people who live and dream and that should be a central object to serve. Governments should be like the common republicans of their peoples.
We tend to cultivate feudal archaisms, consensual courtesanisms, hierarchical differentiations, which brought out the best of the Republics. The play of these and other factors holds us back in prehistory, and today, it is impossible to give up war when politics fails. Thus it strangles the economy and we waste resources. Every minute two million dollars of military budgets are spent in the world, medical research on the planet barely covers a fifth of military research and development. This process ensures hatred and fanaticism, sources of new wars and this also spends fortunes.
It is easy to criticize ourselves nationally and it is innocent to pose, saving from those budgets like other things requires global agreements and preventions and planetary policies of peace or guarantees impossible today. There would be enormous resources to be cut there, but to what hands would humanity go? Today’s world institutions in particular vegetate in the shadow of the dissidents of the great nations, and since they want to retain power for themselves, they actually block the UN, uproot it from planetary democracy and cut off the germ of history. of a global agreement for peace. Difficult to invent a Force worse than the chauvinistic nationalism of the great powers. The Force that is liberating for the weak became oppressive in the arms of the strong. Examples abound in the last two centuries.
The UN languishes and becomes bureaucratized due to lack of power and autonomy, of recognition above all of democracy towards the weak world that is the majority. As an example, Uruguayans participate with 13 to 15% of our Armed Forces in Peace missions. We have been there for years and years, we are always in the places assigned to us, however where resources are decided and distributed we do not even exist to serve coffee. In the depths of our hearts there is a longing to help man get out of prehistory and archive war as a resource when politics fails, we know in our loneliness what war is.
However, these dreams imply fighting for an agenda of global agreements that begin to govern our history, and overcome threats to life. The species should have a government for humanity that overcomes individualism and strives to recreate political heads that turn to science and not just immediate interests. This is not easy or fast if possible.
At the same time, understand that the world’s indigents belong to humanity and that humanity must promote them so that they develop themselves. The necessary resources exist in the squandering predator of our civilization. But almost 20 years ago we discussed the humble Tobin Tax and this illuminates our powerlessness.
It is possible to uproot the indigence of the world and march to stability, it is possible that the future will bring life to the galaxy and man, a conquering animal, will continue with his anthropological inclination, but he will need to govern himself as a species or he will succumb.
Thanks a lot”
Pepe Mujica
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