Indignant International
«I am worried about my children and my grandchildren. I am worried about my neighbors.? A middle-aged American woman tells the television camera why she took to the streets of New York, one more dot in the Occupy Wall Street movement.
It does not take too many words to describe the drama that millions of people across the globe have to face — like stooges in a bad play: the drama of unemployment, the brutal wage cuts, the curtailment of civic rights, the insult of a dumbed-down democracy and the drama of burgeoning poverty, which nothing seemed to have presaged up until very recently, not even the Lehman Brothers scandal.
There was no omen to warn them, and that is because the people who have been hit by the crisis are the citizens of strong and wealthy states that belong to the so-called First World.
What?s more, most of these people truly believed that thanks to their hard work, they had ensured a decent future for themselves and more or less prepared the ground for their offspring.
Now, and as the threat of poverty becomes global, like a pandemic that cannot be defeated by the quackery of the self-styled experts, everything that gave us westerners a sense of superiority is starting to come tumbling down.
As certainty begins to break down, the First World sees the emergence of its own Third World colonies, sometimes at its very heart. These colonies are not populated by beleaguered migrants but by the masses of the ?nouveau pauvre.?
It would perhaps be premature to herald the emergence of an Indignants International. However, one can already hear a political discourse that is more powerful than the emotions that propelled the masses of Greece, Spain, Italy, France and Portugal.
The interaction among the different movements is evident, as is the spirit of solidarity. It is in fact the spirit that led the American woman to say that she is not only worried about her children, but also about her neighbors.
If we somehow end up losing our concern for our fellow citizen, then our cracking societies will surrender to cannibalism. Societies will be reminiscent of troops lost in the desert: when armies ran out of supplies in the old days, they would first turn onto the mercenaries among them. Then it was the turn of the weaker among them and, at the end, those at the low rungs of the hierarchy.
History has often repeated itself as a tragedy.
