From the bakery to a cascade of emotions and reflections

Last week a young woman who attended the neighborhood bakery asked me if I had attended a massive presentation of a famous musical group that moves those who listen to them to dance. I was baffled because I didn’t know such a famous group. Joke goes, joke comes, I ended up asking her if she knew or had heard of two famous singers named, Zitarrosa and Belafonte. She was as baffled as I had been. I explained who they had been and the enormous acclaim they aroused in each presentation (see for yourself in this month’s Initiatives Section the video of an already mature Harry Belafonte singing in 1988). Surprisingly, she asked me questions about both of them and wrote down my answers. I explained what the “Adagio to my country” sung by Zitarrosa and the hundreds of calypsos sung by Belafonte meant in those years. I shared that I met Belafonte at his home when he organized a fundraiser event in support of Mandela and his movement in South Africa; he said he had heard something about Mandela. Anyway, the conversation ended as other customers entered the bakery.

I thought that generational differences are legitimate, that the tastes, rhythms, and contents of songs are changing and that, increasingly, fashions and idioms are induced by the media. That when these media are tremendously concentrated globally, a result is that they tend to homogenize preferences and audiences, so much that a new musical fashion ends up being listened to in India, England, and Ecuador. Although it is not easy to jump from music to social and political realities, I also thought that in these times the diversity of perspectives is narrowed, as facts, stories, and protagonists are forgotten, what is generated by the hegemonic think tanks weighs heavily.

It would be worth asking then how much margin different freewill have today to express their uniqueness beyond orchestrated manipulations, away from the induced hatreds and antagonisms. As the fog generated by falsehoods and deceptions is dense, the covert, what is not ours, but we believe in it is. Shame, great sorrow to think that all that and much more brutally break into an electoral process. Proposals, arguments, and trajectory of the candidates are not contrasted, but theatricalities, echoes, not voices, repeating scripts of experts in deceiving and seducing. In these situations, which hurt because they abound, we recognize even more the critical importance of clarification and militancy options. We join that collective effort.

Readers will excuse this cascade of emotions and reflections.

 Greetings,

The Editors 

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