Bolsonaro's tears

It is no longer a secret that President Jair Bolsonaro suffers from a crying crisis. Sometimes in the silence of the night, as he himself has confessed, and sometimes before some of his Planalto interlocutors as he has published, Igor Gielow in his Folha de S. Paulo column.

It might surprise that the ex-parachutist captain, a military athlete, who defends dictatorship and torture, whose passion is weapons, can cry. It is said that he cries because he feels attacked by everyone, especially by the press that says he hates him. And because he begins to lose millions of those who had voted for him and today they are sorry. And he doesn't know how to win them back.

It is known that his concerns, more than the coronavirus tragedy, are whether or not he may be re-elected in 2022 or that he must leave the Presidency before the end of his term. All this, however, could provoke anger, rage, and revenge. But cry? It is not easy to find important presidents of the republic with crying crisis in the world. Can you imagine a Putin and even a Trump sobbing because they lose consensus?

On crying there is a great psychological literature. We know that, like laughing, crying is also an exclusive faculty of rational beings. Animals don't cry. And humans cry more with pain, emotion and joy than fear. Women are said to cry more than men, but it is more cultural than biological. It is atavistic. Legend has it that when the last Islamic king of Granada in Spain, Boabdil, upon leaving the Alhambra, after handing over the keys to the Catholic Monarchs in 1492, his mother, Sultana Aixa, uttered the famous phrase: “She cries as a woman what she does not you knew how to defend as a man ”. In that phrase all the literature of the myth of the supposed fragility of the woman who is the one who cries in the face of danger is enclosed. Men do not cry.

What would be interesting to know is whether the president who cries on his sleepless nights - in addition to crying because he feels misunderstood and afraid that he will be removed from his throne - also cries for other noble reasons such as the ills Brazil suffers. And certainly there is no lack of reasons for suffering and crying and taking an interest in this country today frightened by the coronavirus epidemic and where millions of people dream of a job that allows them to live decently and that today they fear losing what little they have left.

There are a thousand reasons why Bolsonaro may cry more noble than the fear that his most important ministers or the military of his Government may abandon him. There are reasons to cry seeing the greed of the banks that hang millions of workers with their interests among the world's largest and who remain impassive and cold also today in the face of the tragedy of the epidemic. There are reasons for pain in front of the sea of ​​privileges of politicians and castes that resist dying and that are an offense to the dignity of those who suffer needs and are left to their fate.

It would be a point in his favor, if Bolsonaro the tough was also capable of crying because he felt responsible for all the tears shed in this country for those who would most need help; of all the pain of mothers who lose their children victims of violence to which politicians seem to withdraw their gaze. And although it would be a lot to ask him, that he also be able to cry for the continuous murder of the Amazon and its inhabitants, who find it difficult to accept that they are as or more human than us, even though they are the ones who best preserve the values ​​of the Homo sapiens and that our civilization has forgotten.

It is possible that the crying crises that afflict Bolsonaro are an alarm of some psychic disorder as some try to insinuate. But what worries most is that a president of the size of Brazil, with millions condemned to abandonment, is at the same time patronizing with a capitalism that assassinates the poorest and most excluded from the system.

We don't know the real reason for the President's crying, but it certainly doesn't seem like it was, for example, by the elderly who, according to him, wouldn't mind letting them be devoured by the epidemic. Neither for the poorest and most marginalized in the system, nor for the different, non-athletes, those who have already been punished by nature and left behind by humanity.

Today, Brazil, more than tears of the president, needs courageous policies to recover a society sick with fear, because it does not know whether those who should care for it prefer to continue holding on to its privileges and its greed for power instead of sacrificing for its rescue social and political.

Worse than the crying of the powerful are the tears that the poorest and most persecuted have to swallow before they reach their faces hardened by the abandonment condemned by a power that is allergic to the poor, a word that costs them up to pronounce.

They however exist. The poor and forgotten, who are in the majority, will be tomorrow, or perhaps today, the judges of those who cannot cry for them and with them. The anger of the poor and forgotten could be more dangerous and deadly than that of the epidemic that threatens us all and is forcing us to do a thorough examination of conscience.

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