Quarantine Letter: We will survive!
Gloria Gaynor sang in the 70s: "I've got all my life to live, I've got all my love to give" ...
This letter starts with a question, continues with three phrases of classical, popular, and modern wisdom, respectively, and reaches a conclusion for each and everyone, which is socially equal to that of the individual in the great song of the universal Donna Summer: We will survive!
Cheer up! The question is not if…; the question is how?
While the fourth lock-down finishes or when we expect the fifth and final quarantine to come soon and reach fast its end, the question for most households in the world today is not whether their family and home will mostly survive, but how will we all survive, as a home, as a family, as a city, as a country, as a continent, or as humanity?
Popular, Classical, and Modern Wisdom
We start with the final -with a meme-, then continue with the classic wisdom -through an anecdote- and close with the popular knowledge -by a saying-.
The modern: "My Universe, My Rules"
Until recently, men and women played to be gods, and we built a parallel universe. Please look for the meme in which the modern girl, dressed in pink and with a bloody belly manages to saturate San Pedro at the entrance of paradise and the last, ill-tempered, appears next to Jesus Christ, who has to personally attend to the activist (who advocates with fury for his right to enter heaven) and the owner of the premises says: "Sorry: My Universe, My Rules" ...
The classic: Noel Clarasó and Julio César
For those who are not guided by religion and do not believe in the narrated situation, it is worth reading a classic anecdote in the book "Anthology of Anecdotes" by Noel Clarasó. A book that I have been reading since I was 12 years old, when the Rector of my Jesuit College in Quito gave it to me publicly as a prize for having won the music festival by playing the famous “Vikina” on the organ. For those who are old enough to remember it, beyond Luis Miguel singing said universal Mexican song, there was a “cartoon” of another universal Mexican: “Cantinflas” that traveled the countries in a balloon to the sound of Vikina. For me, looking at that "dibujo animado" (as we used to say in Ecuador to the Chilean "animated monkeys") was just like the song, and it was just like the book received. I have not separated myself from the world as a universe, from the message of the balloon trip to learn about other cultures via humor, and from the song that resounds every time I open Noel Clarasó's book, which I always read randomly, which is viable because It is a large volume, well bound, lined with plastic and with colorful dividers.
Just yesterday I was re-reading, after 30 years of reviewing it, an anecdote that goes with the idea of this article: in it, Clarasó narrates a Julio Caesar founder of libraries and zero-feminist, so much so that when he goes permanently to his closest library he finds once a young woman and asks about her husband. She looks at him defiantly and says she "doesn't have". He, with the public force, throws her out of the premises, and tells her: “go and get one, make your home, and dedicate yourself to producing strong and healthy children for Rome”… (His Empire, his Rules).
The eternal popular wisdom: "Behind every great man there is a great woman ..."
My mother did not like this phrase; Julius Caesar's phrase did not suit her either; she did disagree with abortion, herself being a leading feminist woman in society, her life, and her home. My father didn't like the idea of abortion either; they, in their way, gave life to a household of 10 children of which I am the youngest. They could be my grandparents, and I never heard them say this phrase that "behind every great man there is a great woman." They were autonomous and loved each other many times at the distance between my father's travels and dreams and between my mother's closeness and feminine strength. I have them daily in a photo on my two desks, one next to me, and the other with my wife and the eldest of my daughters on a visit to the coast of Ecuador, all together with my visibly Chinese family.
My first daughter looks more like my wife and my mother, she is not so Chinese, the youngest is my "Mulan", and that is why she is not in the photo, because she is present among all our Oriental family even without appearing in the image. My desk has balanced the photos of my two daughters, for whom today we were talking with my wife about how they will meet their partner with whom they will walk together, give life, and reproduce, as my parents did, and as us -me and my wife- did. We were wondering, how will they have a normal emotional life for girls of their age, in the middle of the pandemic?
Julius Caesar was not so crazy, God is never irrational ...
Our thought, together with my great wife, who usually walks ahead of me in many things, was that Julius Caesar, a great cultist of the classical and imperial, might have ordered “quarantine” (in Latin) –and beware that we are going to investigate - under situations like this, but he would not have cared much about the shrinking of population, since in his time the mandate was still to "grow and reproduce" as a human race.
Extreme feminists have tried to do God's work by cutting off reproduction and demolishing the natural role of women, as well as neglecting the biological role of her womb and bringing to a verge of ridicule the maternal instinct by all means. The new empire of our united lands on mother Earth has supported this demand as a universal right, and the states as the heir of the classic have ignored the most powerful Roman historical emperor, promoting abortion under public health codes in their legislation.
Perhaps Julius Caesar, when looking at this work of the new empire of pax not so roman, but the post-Bretton-Woods pax would do as he did when he saw that his son Brutus was among the 23 conspirators who each stabbed him, including that of his treacherous offspring, in the womb, to his father, despite the fact that he said: "You too, my son."
We already know how Rome ended under Brutus and the decline into which the empire plunged. It survived but was extinguished to make way for Attila, the barbarians, and others who alienated them from their gods and their families, including the Christians, their resilient and Christian Byzantium, and of course, they gave way to what is now Rome: the Christian barbarian Capital of a country that has the Vatican premises within itself, born not after quarantines, but after many persecutions and saved by an intricate system of catacombs that made the Christians strong enough to end up creating their own empire under history and over the popes; yes, those who until today survive connecting the human and what they understand -or perhaps comes to them- as the divine.
WE WILL SURVIVE!
In my case, like my parents, together with my wife and my daughters, we have preferred to look at this quarantine from home as a space to eat deliciously, to pray at each meal, to listen to mass together, and they -our daughters- have followed their rhythm of groups of Catholic communities that work hand in hand with theology together with technology.
It seems that the quarantine is strengthening them and we feel the same about other homes, diverse families, the cities that we interact with, the states that we observe, and sometimes we even see some positive conspiracy from the same universe.
Someone said that there would be more violence in homes, and in the face of the reduction in femicides as such, observed in several countries, more and more, it seems that we -male men- are not as bad as they painted us.
The radical feminist discourse now is that it will be necessary to wait a while to evaluate reality; however, in my opinion as an economist and expert in social protection issues, but also a musician, poet, and madman, who looks at these phenomena scientifically and communicationally, it seems to me that if there had been a new double-blinded study showing trends that would statistically show, systematically, structurally or temporarily, that quarantine annihilates the women - from their male perpetrators - the evidence would have emerged some months ago, and it would have become a viral scandal through the activism of these years, many weeks ago, really.
It seems that there is no such scientific evidence of tested direct and non-biased relation among the pandemic and an increase of gender violence from men to women (controlling by other variables such as income, unemployment, or other confusing facts that require study).
Historical evidence shows -on the other hand- how it seems that the homes will survive strengthened. It looks like the families will abandon quarantine walking together, hand-by-hand among fathers and mothers, with households that have been rebuilding by weeks and weeks. It seems that those who were in the struggles of the streets and the universities have also had to return to follow the mandate of Julius Caesar, studying at home, becoming part of the traditional means to get to know a couple, and sometimes, without a traditional wedding -or many times- getting to reproduce, as it was seen a few hours ago, that people came out of quarantine in Santiago de Chile, in Providencia, and celebrated: a very dear friend, to another very dear friend who, in his own quarantine, and In his own home, he had been a father.
Perhaps the evidence that we will see at Christmas, for December, or for 2021, is rather not that of the bloody bellies meme, but that of life created under the eternal rules of the universe. Nor will it be that of uneducated and barbaric women, but it will be that of pregnant women giving educated children to the world, perhaps with birth rates typical of what is being called to become the new era that will emerge from the hand of the "children from quarantine ”. We will have to look at trends and evaluate them after some time.
We will see the statistics.
Survive
Perhaps we should be left with the ability to survive, and to raise male children that are not gross, not barbarous, nothing "poca madre" as Mexicans would say, but strong male children, whether they are newborn or reborn, from the bosom of their homes. , with their mothers, with their parents who are very "padre" (as Cantinflas would say in his films to denote something great).
And of course: we may see families and households that will not demand so many rights from the new empire but will have formed many of their convictions around the home as a space of original responsibility, where dishes are washed, peace is maintained, and everything is achieved together, as a team.
The means of verification will be the media and the networks, seeking to the extreme the diversity of the sources, in their day-to-day collecting of stories that would make sense their audience, in satisfaction for everyone's new self and fulfilling for each one's own case.
Our humanity is being returned to us
In my own way, I observe nowaday´s reality far from my country of origin, far from my mother, but close to my wife and my two daughters, who without me being a great man, give me the blessing of accompanying my days as the three great women they are, and the great leading futures that they depict for me every day, in each conversation.
I hope they can say the same about any good idea they might get from our readers´ comments here.
I hope for all men in the World, they can say the same, and I hope that all women can say, as my mother used to say: that together with every great accomplished woman, there is a great man, son or husband, father, or grandfather, who has accompanied her not only to survive but for creating life!
If this is so, DO NOT HESITATE: we will survive!
Roberto F. Salazar-Córdova
Santiago, Chile, September 5th, 2020
Ps: let's stay with Gloria Gaynor's hymn to enjoy these wonderful days!
See the original article in Spanish at https://www.adnplus.co.uk/post/sobreviviremos (100+ views)
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