I heard about an exhibition of works by Banksy in Los Angeles, which took place in hangars. He painted some internal walls of the hangars in a certain pattern and in the exhibition, among the many works on display, he released an elephant painted in the same pattern (the documentary I watched explained that the paint used on the elephant was harmless to the animal's health). It was an emphatic and clear statement about the “normalization” of the abnormal (in this case, massive poverty on the planet). Just make up as usual...
I keep seeing Banksy's elephants around… Yesterday, for example, I went to the pharmacy, a place I don't usually go to. And when I go, I'm always shocked by the amount of products that are proven to be harmful to health sold alongside “medicines” (we won't go into the merits of how much the remedies are beneficial to health here). Snacks, soft drinks, “energizers”, chocolates, sweets, ice cream, etc. stroll innocently in the aisles of the place that supposedly sells products that promote health. Really?
The same disbelief took me when I went to research, some time ago, what pre-salt was. And I was shocked to see that the discussion about “who should own the pre-salt layer” was an absurd deviation from the route! The pre-salt, which greases the bowels of the planet, belongs to the planet! And it must remain there, greasing its entrails! Any pseudo-solution for our “modern” life that requires fracturing deep layers of the Earth to extract its juice not only does not “solve” anything but will obviously cause damage!
And the indecent numbers of people starving on a planet where some have enough to live very well for hundreds of lives?!
But it seems that we got used to swallowing narratives without questioning. And any “solution” that seems easy then is an immediate blockbuster! We want to abstract the problems, and don't realize that this attitude is burying us more and more in them...
The common enemy narrative is a favorite and a very dangerous one. When we choose a common enemy and accept that the solution is to get rid of him, we are consuming fast-solution and alienating ourselves from the issue. It may give you a little satisfaction at the time, but it will take a toll later.
Removing Bolsonaro from power, neutralizing the coronavirus, arresting the “bad guys”, taking out the trash from our house, declaring a “war on drugs”, taking medicine for indigestion from that poison we ate are some examples of these non-solutions. Calm down, people, not a cell in my body wants Bolsonaro to remain in power, or for the coronavirus to continue to strike terror... but if we don't stop to understand how we arrived at these surreally terrible scenarios, it won't be the vaccine or Lula's election that will manage to put an end to the vicious cycle of destruction and disconnection that we are living.
The difference between our situation and that Banksy exhibition is that nobody painted anything here… we are the ones who turn a blind eye. And there lies the cornerstone of the construction of our distortions. How did we become so automatic, so insensitive, so mentally and physically lazy, so joyless, dreamless, how did we start losing the ability to see Life, in all its wonder, enchantment and Power?!
Well, various psychology schools have many answers to these questions and they all go through childhoods subjected to adults who had already lost these fundamental human connections, themselves survivors of similar childhoods... So what's the way back? Go back to Adam and Eve and exact damages? The return is not to the past. We need to go back to the Present. The only place where it is possible to live, create, love – a tripod that truly sustains Life.
The moment we perceive the distortion, with this perception comes the responsibility for a more coherent vision. There's something strange about this room... is this elephant supposed to be here? Is it good for us? Is it good for the elephant? No? So… are we going to do something about it?
We have been neglecting our body for a long time, consuming poison quietly, failing to dance, to move with pleasure, to create and play with it... We neglect Gaia's body, actively or simply passively watching the elephant destroy whatever is in front of us, because it seems so normal, and I look so small to do something... We built the ideal situation on the planet for a virus to do the damage it did, and the discussion revolves around the vaccine! It's not going to be possible to live in the extinguishing of fires forever...
Let's question oil extraction? Let's question the extraction of stones and ores that only feed financial hunger and generate incredible systems of violence against people and the Earth? Let's question putting children full of energy in closed rooms, sitting in chairs for 4 hours a day, going through the torture of having to "learn" a bunch of things that don't interest them, being compared and competing with each other for recognition? Let's question the manufacture of guns?! Yes, manufacturing! What are weapons made for? Why make bombs? Why make missiles? What about missile planes? What about plastic manufacturing? What about pesticides? The list is huge... Is it simple to change paradigms so rooted in our culture? Not at all. But that is no reason not to engage in this movement. I do not intend to propose paths here, only questions. Perhaps the question mark is our greatest ally at the moment. And perhaps the manufacture of fighter planes is a subject that is somewhat distant from our lives, so we start with what is closer. Those things that we ended up normalizing, but that taste weird... trust your emotional palate. Go there, investigate, question... and trust the power of a question mark well felt in the body, in the heart. There is no ready answer, but there is within us an immense capacity to relate to the circumstances that life presents and to move from this relationship. We used to do this when we were little, but we didn't know. Rescuing this ability, in my experience, reconnects me with Joy. The joy of being an adult, a creator!
