Portugal obliterated
And behold, arriving at the second pandemic Christmas, we find ourselves more hampered by fear than the first. The economy is less limited in movements, we are almost all vaccinated, covid kills less, pushes fewer seriously ill patients to the hospital, but even so, this damn micron variant is managing to be much more destructive of our naive vocation to believe that already we were farther from the end.
Because the sneaky virus always finds a trapdoor to enter, it always manages to find a way to return in force to us. Now, if there is one thing we learned as this traumatizing collective experience, it was the importance of relativizing things. From defeats, but above all from conquests. This is certainly not what we would like to say to each other on a day like today, of family harmony and communion, of spiritual goodness, but fairy tales are only worth believing if we want to be deceived.
In the usual Christmas message to the Portuguese through the pages of Jornal de Notícias, which the President of the Republic Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa has already turned into an institutional ritual, it is this cry that is also requested, an effort to direct our energies towards those who they remain removed from the political discourse and so often from the media agenda. Or, as the head of state so aptly retakes, “our conscience cannot stop on the 26th or the 2nd of January”.
Let us pay attention, therefore, to the millions of Portuguese without a back-up, without social and economic support, to all those whose mental health is deeply contaminated. For these will continue to be irretrievably forgotten, unable to emerge from this torpor. That in 2022, a year of decisive political decisions, we will be able to listen more to this obliterated, impoverished Portugal, to present it with serious and achievable solutions, which we will be able to take from this corner where we wait with an outstretched hand, hostage to public support that simultaneously they save and condemn him to generational poverty.
* Associate Director