Over breakfast, in a daily conversation with my daughter, I encounter one of the saddest legacies of the current Constitution and political culture: the disrecognise, the misinformation, the undressing of the public, the depoliticized individualism of our education. The state of – not mind – that the military government was able so well to install transgenerationally, at the tip of fear, control, technocracy, repression and death. One of the most terrible consequences for our post-dictatorship society is that we are too busy in banal consumption and personal agency, that every social bond has been lost as a support of a community life worthy and capable of being enjoyed.
Without civic education in schools, with critical philosophical thinking looked suspiciously at its capitalist in-utility, we find childhoods and youth that consider the look at politics old-fashioned and boring. We were taken away – first with repression and then with consumerist and aspirational theology – the possibility of imagining and developing a change in our ways of life. That same anesthetized youth of the public, it was paradoxically that brought us when we woke up: dressed as a penguin, dressed in 2011, dressed in evasion, covered in “It’s not 30 pesos, it’s 30 years.”
Without prejudice to this, a good part of the youth and children in Chile do not know what the Constitution is and has no interest in knowing what is being voted on on 25 October. If they know, they believe that nothing has to do with them, with their reality, lived in the middle of screens, optical fibers, 4G, brands, immediate gratification and superficiality. That is a sintomal effect of the time, of corrupt politics, of empty education, of individual atomism as an unconscious ideology.
That is why I vote Apruebo and do so with a constituent convention, because I want us to re-import, to get involved again, to be citizens who participate in the social pact, who know it, who are committed to the whole. For so many who, day by day, are violated and abandoned by the oppressive and subsidiary state. I approve of a citizen who is aware of his rights and outraged at injustice.
We are living an essential public “awakening”, which urgently urges and which must occur, in turn, within our homes, in that microphysical space of power. It is not enough to wear the green handkerchief for the march, write the banner of repudiation of impunity for human rights violations, weep for the eyes lost in the massacre of the popular revolt… we need to actively weave and build a new social pact.
Awakening is an act of daily consciousness, rooted in becoming. In the conversations during breakfast, in the relationship with the neighbor, in knowing which and where are the poorest communes of Santiago and Chile, and never getting used to their excluded and veiled existence. In knowing the social problems and having multiple proposals to correct them. That we learn to re-think, reflect, dialogue, discuss and build politics, in all social spaces. Not only in Parliament or in the powers of the State, but in the territories and neighbourhoods.
The right to do politics is ours, but we forget what to do with it, to such an extent that it has been for decades reduced to a pitiful mock of false elections co-opted by oligarchy and its class interests. Its financing and mechanics attest to this. Hypnosis worked, but the awakening came to stay and rewrite Chile with blank leaf, open eyes and throbbing hearts.
