Tag: sorry

estherlyon:

Around fourteen years ago, I was a young (and rather sheltered) History student. My friends and I used to lie down in mattresses on the floor in the tiny room in the student housing building one of them lived in, slightly high and giddy, and we’d ponder what we thought was unthinkable. This was 2004 and we’d been involved with rememberance activities (lectures, seminars, classes), since it was 40 years since the military coup that saw thousands killed in our country. Some of them were students like us, some of them were grabbed by police from the very building we were in. 

What we pondered was “what would we do if-” and the end of that sentence, unspoken was “if it happened again”. That was hilariously unthinkable to us because we were born in the last throes of that same regime. Its end was a messy, mostly peaceful negotiation that involved the signing in 1979 of an amnesty law that cleared both those who had fought against it and those who had killed and tortured in its name… And I don’t need to tell you how that in itself is problematic. My friends usually laughed at my answer: “I’d go into exile, because I faint when I see blood” (I still do).

I didn’t even know of Bolsonaro’s existence then. The people we saw denying or justifying the dictatorship’s crimes were old military men or elderly people who we thought didn’t know any better. Newspapers usually treated the period as a stain in our past, when they themselves had been censored and used to publish cake recipes in the place of the stories that were struck down. We didn’t know that people who might miss this time or had weird misconceptions about it (“it was safer to walk in the streets”, “the economy was a lot better”) were living right next door to us or were, in some cases, our own parents. 

Tonight is especially hard because I miss being that girl. I miss laughing about how I faint when I see blood (I still do), I miss having a future as an academic without any fear of saying, reading and writing what I want. I miss not being afraid for my friends who were LGBTQ+ or people of color or involved in party politics. Today I had to buy clothes softner while a couple milled around me with t-shirts on which there was the face of a man who said I deserve to be shut up, if not jailed (or worse), and that some of my friends aren’t deserving of being alive. Mostly through the measures of the democratic governments that preceeded this mess, I became a researcher and then a professor at a freshly created university. Now all that is at risk and then some (the Amazon, what is left of our indigenous peoples, Afro-Brazilian communities, workers’ rights, children’s rights, years of a people trying to learn how to make democratic choices). 

We’re not a dictatorship yet, but the man who was elected our president tonight (through the popular vote, not some incomprehensible electoral college system) is a former army captain who has repeatedly said he would support the return of a similar regime and that the only mistake it made was torturing instead of killing its opponents. 

I faint when I see blood.