What To Do With The Lower Classes

“As far as I know, the inhabitants never bought their land, they (or their parents) INVADED the area – exploiting the flawed Constitution.”

The above was left on the comment section of the latest video on RioOnWatch’s youtube channel. My friends, yes, I am about to chase after a comment and spill out my guts about it. I am very mad.
This comment represents how we, in the movement against the eviction of squatter communities in Rio de Janeiro, are alone, and those directly afflicted by it are alone, barely a single unaffected Brazilian citizen ready to stretch an arm in support, society instead washes its hands as our government violates its own people. It represents how much I hate Rio de Janeiro’s society, how much I despise it, really, and how there is no way I can live in Rio de Janeiro without in some way being close to the struggle of our poor, not for anyone’s sake but my own, because I don’t want the schizophrenic condition that marks you a “carioca”.
With “as far as I know”, the speaker, from his podium, declares that although his knowledge admittedly only goes so far, it is sufficient to write off an entire group of people and have them shipped to the Gulag. But what really kills me is when he says the constitution “flawed”. What he means is that the constitution in fact protects people’s right to housing, people’s right to the land they have settled on for several years, whether or not they owned it on paper. Not that Government actually observes this from the constitution, but this guy is not only aware of it, but he thinks it should be changed, presumably, so that it may not be further exploited by the greedy poor. That is a higher level of sophistication than we normally see.
And now… we roll back to 1500, when Pedro Álvares Cabral arrives in Salvador and, with money from the Portuguese crown, buys Brazil from the indigenous peoples that inhabited the area, who were promptly relocated to the firmament. Portugal subsequently transferred ownership of the individual lots of land to the families that still own them or have themselves transferred it to yet other owners since. This should exhaust any possibility that the squatters featured in the video may have been justified in their wild greed.
So this happened 500 years ago, yes I know, it couldn’t possibly still have any significance today. Likewise, it shouldn’t really matter that Brazil’s official language is Portuguese, that Blacks and Indians, even after centuries of enslavement came to an end, don’t live in complete equality in any society in the Americas (another injustice deeply connected to ownership of land). All these things are merely incidental, as something that happened 500 years ago cannot influence events today, the only things that can have any bearing on anything today is things that have happened during my lifetime, because then, corporal punishment can be administered, if nothing else, and thus, blame rightly in place, society is absolved and Humanity can roam free on the Garden of Eden.
Which brings me to Brazil’s most popular religious character, the one depicted atop Corcovado in Rio de Janeiro. I know, I know hypocrisy is old news, but I’m gonna carry on, you don’t have to read if you don’t want to… I just want to pose one question: when Jesus was up on the cross, what did he say of his killers?
I’m not a religious person, but I kind of like the story of Jesus, and I thought that that moment was really the climax, and defined the entire story and message in one line: what I’d call ultimate forgiveness. Regardless, a good story to be influenced by, like many have been influenced by “Scarface” or “Jackass”, in their behavior. But for all the adoration, this is something we are completely lost to incorporate in our real lives. And that’s fine, I don’t want our society to institutionalize ultimate forgiveness, that could be messy, I know, but what I really don’t want to see is a population volunteering to operate the guillotine themselves.
A citizen like the writer of that comment is able to freely sign off on another group of people’s fate. “What for?” is my question. How can you be so disconnected from another human being that you don’t give it a second thought, you don’t put yourself in their place? And knowing that a democratic country’s leaders are really just a reflection of the society they represent, evidently in Rio de Janeiro, I wonder, what other country in the world treats its own citizens like that? The Brazilian citizenship is worthless, we are treated like rubbish, we hear and see other countries where citizens have reason to be proud of their citizenship, where citizens have things to be grateful for, where the country is always hooking its citizens up, helping them out, making life easier on them. Not in Brazil. In Brazil, sometimes the only problem you have in your life is that you live within its borders and it is coming out to get you.
The thing is, though, there have been other situations in history in which the society had the means through which to officially deny the citizenship of its oppressed. Not in Brazil. Maybe if favela dwellers were all members of a specific caste or ethnicity, it would be easier to understand what is going on. The big drawback of Brazil’s racial amalgamation. Maybe that’s what’s missing, for people to start understanding that Brazil operates an Apartheid society: giving the poor an identity.
My conclusion: Brazilian society wants the poor dead. Brazilian society is ripe for a lunatic to come up with the final solution for the problem of the poor. If someone could propose it confidently, Brazil would vote it into law.
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=7200929494560754174&hl=en&fs=true