9.14.2004

Que no cesen las gotas de agua / Joaquín Marta Sosa

May the Drops of Water Remain Incessant


It isn’t easy to write with the persistent sensation that something, somewhere, has been stolen from you. But one has to continue because important things, which can never be taken from you, remain. For instance, that enormous social force that has proceeded to build itself throughout recent years, gaining momentum first with protests and now with the vehement necessity of reserving an alternative for the future. Because if anything has remained far from any hesitation, it has been the enormous weight of underdevelopment that trails the confirmed leader.

This was evident in the obscene and arbitrary use of all aspects of power throughout the recent referendum campaign, thanks to his mugging of state funds. This was manifested in the opportunistic and sectarian use of institutions, goods and accomplices.

It acquired a pathetic profile with the circumstantial invention of missions and missionaries, which in almost every case have been torrents of public funds whose highest percentage ends up in the pockets of a few, and rarely, except for the illusions of the desperate, among the necessities of the majority.

It is about the reverse represented in the private use of public powers, in other words, for sectarian ends; in the vampiristic use of public institutions which have gone from failing to becoming scarecrows; in the appropriation of the urgencies of the poor in order to give them bread crumbs with the hope that tomorrow they will become diamonds.

Such nature acquires shades of horror within its most extreme groups, who make aggression their preferred weapon. As if democracy had not been invented centuries ago to prevent people from murdering with that thief’s privilege, into which the demented defense of a political position has degenerated for some.

And it is about, no more and no less, resisting against that chain that intends to make us travel through an impossible time tunnel until we go as far back as possible. All in the name of the wretched of the earth, whom he dedicates himself to making more and more wretched while patting their backs and dedicating some discourse to them from above regarding their “dignity so often dishonored.” A dignity that is reduced to trills and sweet words from a balcony, while little is done to transform it into the right to grow in freedom, autonomy and a true quality of life.

Nothing new, then. All of it with an unbearable smell of mold and catacombs. But in the end, amid a series of advantages and arbitrary rules reminiscent of the worst slave master ways, he has been ratified. OK.

The road which has brought him and which has brought us up to this moment doesn't close at that curve on an August Sunday. He will continue to open it with his populist rake and with the idiotic cult of personality. We have to continue to open it with optimism, tenacity and a spirit open to times that have already become others, and not precisely thanks to the ratified, but instead, against his profoundly reactionary nature.

The road of the hundreds of thousands who have marked streets and highways and of the millions who have voted fearlessly for his removal, this road continues to demand of us that we go forth with our task firmly and democratically, without concessions to doubt or skepticism. Because, at the core, nothing is harder to knock down and nothing is easier to defeat than those who nourish their lights with anachronous winds that stir up the caverns. They nourish themselves off that which is already dead, off that which is capable of frightening or seducing but never inspiring.

Difficult times will likely haunt us. His model has no secrets: after each step he believes he has progressed, offers of reconciliation and humility rain down on us. In the end these offers are more volatile than smoke and more deceitful than promises of a paradise on earth. What actually returns, with sordid regularity, is the enraged intimidator, the harsh answer hovering over the disobedient, the relapse of denying everything possible from the dissident. And what he uses as his source of permanence is the despair and resignation of those who wander near the temptation of considering him undefeatable. Neither he nor anyone else is undefeatable. They pretend to change history and what happens is that history finishes them.

Insistent drops of water, falling on the same point of the pedestal, stubborn, until piercing through stone. Nothing is stronger that the weakness of water when its current flows incessantly, day and night. The small drops of water are the big ones, the true change-makers: when they join together they acquire the consistency of the unstoppable.




{ Joaquín Marta Sosa, El Nacional, 19 August 2004 }

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