opinion

Hopes and realities
by Miguel Antonio Bernal

"Many years later, facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía had occasion to remember that remote afternoon on which his father took him to get to know the ice..." García Márquez teaches us, to take us by the hand on the road that lets us join hope and reality in a unique present, as Cortazar told us. And this deals, without a doubt, with reality and with the hope on which it now hangs, now that things have names but we still aren't able to put our finger on them.

Thus, reading an interesting article that a friend sent me, and learning that "palimpsest," which the dictionary defines as a "parchment manuscript whose first writing has been erased to write anew on it;" and "To look in palimpsest at the past of a city, or a country, and see the same form as the present, with its consequent prescience of the future, would have to be a civic duty..." he asked me if Panamanian citizens, eight years into the present century have done what's up to us as an integral part of our civic duties.

However, a jog through our reality wouldn't allow us to evade the realization that, now in permanent fashion, those sectors most called upon to have an active and transforming vision in order to effectively approach the social and political progress that lives in the world society of which we form a part, and our public officials and the power brokers whom they represent, insist upon and persist in turning their backs.

The latest decisions by the branches of government, taken on the last days of the old year, are cause for universal horror. But all for naught --- the farce continues on course! --- opening the way for the social tragedy that crave in order to satisfy their voracious appetite for power.

Hope is as scarce as blood in the hospital blood banks; as auditors for the pending audits of such generalized corruption; as the will to witness so that what's happening to us now doesn't happen again; as the ability to convince ourselves that the joinder of the moral and the political is not only necessary but urgent and possible and that we have to accomplish it with everyday democratizing actions.

We're wasting precious opportunities for change and with them, heading toward more of the repudiable immoralities of political practices that we shouldn't allow anymore, toward more actions that attempt to throw a lifeline to a drowning system that they seek to save behind our backs, so that we don't hope for better days --- so that we don't recover our dignity as citizens and act!

The author is a law professor at the University of Panama, president of the Colegio de Abogados Honor Tribunal, host of the Alternativa radio show and website and independent candidate for mayor of Panama City in 2009