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opinionAlso in this section: Actors needed by Miguel Antonio Bernal The frustration and disappointment resulting from last May's election has now commenced. The adversaries of democracy who were born, raised and developed in the shadow of the dictatorship have also begun to show their true face. Thus there is a need to rely upon citizen actors, who intervene with decision and conviction to defend the elemental procedures of all democratic society and to respond --- before it's too late, and what little we have accomplished is once again taken away. We have seen in the past weeks how the principal exponents of the state bureaucracy and the leaderships of the principal forces that hold real power have not vacillated in rising up in all their arrogance, haughtiness and aggressiveness to defend their privileges. We citizens who believe in a better future must urgently leave behind all vacillations, doubts and cowardice and assume our position with determination in the face of the resurgent predators. The actions of the governing and dominant leaderships show us day by day their incapacity and inefficiency to lead our society, by the setbacks for freedom, peace, progress and above all the hope of steadily improving the quality of life. Their recent denial of meaningful change --- by taking advantage of reforms to the militarist constitution with the concurrence of opportunists and social climbers disguised as 2020 and civilistas --- certifies to us the need for a true constitutional change that permits us to have more democratic, more dynamic, more transparent, more efficient governmental institutions, which are also more respectful of our dignity as citizens. We need citizen actors to assume their roles as protagonists, so that those who clothe themselves in privileges are not allowed to attempt to represent us and replace us with the aim of avoiding the urgently needed transformation of our society. Centuries ago, Rousseau clearly taught that "in the instant that a people permits itself to be represented, it loses its freedom." The same author of the Social Contract stated with clarity that: "you can't have patriotism without freedom; nor freedom without virtue; nor virtue without citizens. Create citizens and you will have all you need --- without them you won't have anything but debased slaves, from the rulers of the state on down." The recent decision to open a military academy indicates to us now the effects of an "overdose" of power are showing, and reminds us that "no tiger turns into a vegetarian," that the beast is not in the cage. Militarism and those who are nostalgic for it are in power and that only leaves us two options: chain it or pray that it will be satiated. We hadn't finished leaving the caves in which they submerged us for 21 years when "the same, with the same" rose again, accompanied as always with all their misery and anti-popular and anti-democratic machinations. Atrophied by the abuse of power and by overstepping their bounds, they've come back with their minds also atrophied and indisposed to permit the advancements we need in the fields of freedoms, guarantees and civil rights. The new military school is another kick from the boot of authoritarianism and autocracy to our dignity, evidence of the need for citizen actors to do away with the impostors. They have taken control with the complicit silence on the part of those university intellectuals who have made their genuflection before the the monarchical power of the rector that they have achieved, which is how they attempt to maintain all the nonsense and put their unsustainable lies and deceits into industrial production. We can't stop being entertained by the legislative circus, the judicial farce or the spectacle of confrontations and feuds in the executive branch. In all these they're only seeking to maintain their privileges and unconfessable advantages, by impeding us from acting for the common good, for equity, for justice, for solidarity. Through fear, manipulation, dissuasion, sanctions and violence they attempt to maintain us citizens as simple spectators. The attempt to keep us from being agents of change, real actors in the construction of the world that really belongs to us. We have to stop being the grooms that walk in front of the master's horse and assume the role as actors, to act as citizens before it's too late. In a democracy the only way is to act. Let's be actors!
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