When I think of the generations of Colombians moved by the desire to change the world, the same who traveled with the students, across borders, through a planet where young Americans marched against the Vietnam War, the French May joined in an excited cry, Latin America took to the streets to demand an equal and free state, I think I too would have joined that shared illusion of a paradigm shift.
But it turned out that I was born when the hangovers of the revolutionary disappointments of Stalinism, the Sandinista fraud, the prostitute Cuba of the eighties, the fall of Venezuela had already been experienced. And yes, there is the horror of the right and its dictatorships, its abuses and crimes, but this does not and never has represented a dream that we could have shared as humanity.
For me, a curious forty-something writer, mother of two, we are the result of a sum of loves and hates, our own and others, mingled with lectures, conversations and experiences, more or less traumatic, some happy. With that we make a theory, a mixture of emotions that we convert into words we call ideas, and with those ideas we make decisions. We turn such pasta into a vote on election day, a more or less heated conversation at the end of the year at a workplace dinner, a certainty, an idea of direction or destiny, in short, a vindication of what we are and why we behave the way we do.
In my case, if reading, traveling and conversation have helped me, it is to understand that I love freedom in art, where it comes from and where it goes. Because real art has no political affiliations, activism or slogans. He also doesn’t understand the dynamics of utilities, he doesn’t have an action plan, he doesn’t know about targets or guarantees. In art, the gesture is a motive that thinks and acts from the ethereal, the revolutionary, the pure, the fleeting. Like childhood, like dreams, like fantasy, like the desire to fly outside the circle of the stable, of the predictable.
But then what happens when a change, a political transformation, is mobilized from the idea of the revolutionary and ethereal gesture that is more related to the artistic drive than to the stable and sustainable model that a state needs to function? What happens when an emotional, innovative expression has to become an action plan, goals and balances? What happens when the discourse of going against the action has to take the seat of those in favor of the action and weigh its results against ideology and slogans?
In this biweekly space of freedom for which I am so grateful, I think of Human Colombia, of the Historical Pact, of its ideals and of the disconnection with the threads woven from rhetoric to action, from the box in the Casa de Nariño to the areas, from the word of the leaders to the reality of the country where insecurity is on the rise, as well as dissatisfaction, uncertainty and the feeling that the gap between what is said and what is happening is widening with the passage of time. months.
Many democracies today seem hurt (hopefully not fatally) by this rift between discourse and fact. As if words are some kind of magical territory where everything is fine as long as we insist it is. As if we could live in a compact universe, a kind of safe metaverse, made of slogans, proclamations and affirmations, where reality is outside, somewhere else. Like in art.
The problem is that we do not live in a novel, nor in a performance, a canvas or a philosophical thesis. It seems like a no-brainer to say, and yet it is often confirmed that this government is unclear.
