Change actually does happen here — and can come riding in strange ways.
Archive photo by Eric Jackson.

The civic awakening

by Miguel Antonio Bernal

Rapid advancing daily events, bringing changes in whatever field, have begun to produce effects on our usually indifferent population.

Despite the multiple controls imposed by the joint criminal enterprise that governs us, and the disorderly misinformation via the media of different geographical, popular and professional sectors, there is an awakening of discontent, disagreement and disappointment, which has been growing in the nest for so long.

It is not yet a collective, community awakening, not even organized or totally externalized. But, like all social awakenings, it’s a beginning whose different expressions are manifested in different ways, at different times and places, and also by different people.

Of course, for those in authoritarian positions who live with their backs to reality, and from the habitually indifferent, the “nothing happens here” expectation serves as a blind from which to do nothing – as something happens and will happen.

Everything that’s happening is accumulating. There are more and more tensions, which are beginning to surface and announce themselves. It’s an awakening before the act. The absolute failure of the governing system demands absolute changes through a fundamentally participatory process, which is the one most feared by those who love the status quo.

History teaches us to prepare for the unexpected. From history we also learn that nations, once awakened, will seek to achieve their dreams whatever the costs.

Thus we must be demanding, as the civic awakening slowly but surely appears and advances, slowly but surely, so that we get to the urgent changes that allow us to fully exercise our freedoms and rights, today trampled by authoritarianism. Even if we come to them like oxen and a cart.

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