The poet and novelist William Ospina published his anthology “Essays” (Random House Literature) and in this text he invites you to believe in a future.
They say that once, faced with a fierce discussion about the future, Oscar Wilde recommended that the polemicists abandon the subject, saying: “You don’t have to worry so much about the future. The future has done nothing for us ”. The truth is that while the future has never done anything for us, it has done a lot against us, as we often sacrifice our entire present for the splendid future that we, our children or our remote descendants will live.
I believe that in this search for an effective transformation of the Colombian reality, the first thing we have to abandon is the idea that we are working for the future. I often hear people say in meetings that analyze our historical drama that we can no longer hope for the men of the present, that we must think of the men of the future, the only ones who may have any redemption, that for that reason the only way to change to our society is to think about children and that the only effective instrument for this transformation is pedagogy. (More from the special Colombia united: Gabriel García Márquez’s speech on the beloved homeland).
Perhaps in a generation or two, they say, we will have formed a new man and the world will begin to be different. When I hear these statements I always wonder who is going to train those lucky generations who are going to be saved from the chaos of history and who are going to receive, through an ingenious pedagogy, a happy world.
And I understand that there is a deep contradiction in affirming that the beings of today are not capable of transforming a present that we know and suffer from, and that instead we will be capable of transforming the future, of which nothing has been revealed to us. The truth is that whoever wants to change the world must change the present, and can be sure that by doing so, they will change the future. But for this it is necessary to know what needs to be changed in the present and this offers many difficulties for everyone.
Colombians have grown up in extreme individualism and at most we feel affected by things that concern our family or our closed circle of friends. Beyond that, what happens is someone else’s business and we do not want to participate in their grief. This attitude, however, is what allows the atrocious events to multiply, because the victims are increasingly alone and defenseless, and the perpetrators will feel increasingly free to act and more unpunished. Thus, completely discreet behavior by each of us has tremendous public repercussions. And what we do not want to warn is that this attitude, which seems to protect us from chaos and save us from responsibility, is what allows us to be victims, equally defenseless, of a climate of lack of solidarity that we continually help to form.
Follow the news of El Espectador on Google NewsThat indifference to everything public and community is the main evil of our nation. Where no one identifies with the other: where no one recognizes himself in the other, no one can come to believe in the common interest.
Colombia has reached that extreme state in which everything that was respectable, everything that was sacred, everything that was venerable, has been desecrated. The boundaries between truth and lies, legitimacy and usurpation, innocence and guilt are unknown.
I was wondering a while ago: who will be in charge of teaching the new generations everything they have to learn to live in a fairly livable, fair and reasonable country? Obviously, teachers will have to be today’s adults.
The next question is: and who will teach us, malformed by education, family tradition, social exclusion, an irresponsible state and petty prejudices, how to build a livable, reasonable and fairly fair country? And I answer that reality is teaching us. A lot of truths, which would seem like exaggerations and outbursts twenty years ago, are now elementary evidence. The invisible causes are now obvious. And although this does not guarantee anything, since it is also necessary that we have the insight to notice all that is evident, I think that Colombians are learning to notice it.
I believe that sooner or later all Colombians, fed up with the precarious fate that the society that we have made with our passivity and silence has offered us, will be part of an opinion movement civilized enough to suggest and impose sensible changes in our social order. changes that not only bring Colombia to the level of the most enterprising contemporary countries, but also allow us to propose a model of society that takes into account our most important singularities. A society that has bold and innovative proposals in the field of the use and protection of biodiversity; that it is capable of opposing the unbridled consumption of societies that lack a deep relationship with the earth and its mystery; who knows how to value and stimulate human creativity over the oppressive inertias of consumption.
And I believe that we will achieve it by overcoming the defects of dependency, of spiritual colonialism, the superstition of underdevelopment that believes that progress is to stop being what we are and to put the Guambiano Indians to dance classical ballet. The same character that we need to learn to differentiate between lies and truth, legitimacy and usurpation, love for a people and love for a position, friendship and complicity, we also need to learn to differentiate between progress and mere novelty, the adulation of the masses and true respect for a culture, education and domestication.
Let’s make the means look like the ends or, better yet, learn to enrich and ennoble the present, and we won’t have to worry about the future. The reality that needs to be changed is here and now. The beings we have to transform are us.
* Excerpt from the book “William Ospina: essays”, recently published under the Random House Literature label.
