Brazilian youth 'want change now'
| Rio de Janeiro
鈥⑻�A version of this post ran on the author's blog,听riorealblog.com.听The views expressed are the author's own.
When I first came to Brazil, in 1981, hit parade American songs took six months to show up on the radio here. When I first came, working-class people over 30 had false teeth. Now, they sport braces.
Last year, I tried to explain to Alessandra Orofino, the young co-founder of the successful new Meu Rio digital activism group, how much the country has changed.
鈥淚 don鈥檛 care about that,鈥� she said. 鈥淚 wasn鈥檛 here to see it and I鈥檓 here now, and I want change now.鈥�
Who are these young people?
Who are the protesters, people who have taken to the streets all over the country, at long last? There鈥檚 great variety. [Earlier this week] on television, I saw teachers in Juazeiro do Norte whose wages had been cut 40 percent. Discovering their mayor at a bank branch making a deposit (!), they surrounded him. Hours later, the police safely escorted him out.
From what I鈥檝e watched on TV, read on Facebook, and, last Monday night, seen on the streets of Rio myself, the protesters are mostly young men in their twenties, students. Not workers. So why are they protesting?
I bet the mayors of Rio and S茫o Paulo rue the day this past January, when they bowed to President Dilma Rousseff鈥檚 request that they put off the bus fare hike for six months, to help her keep inflation down. If the fare hike had taken place then, the students would have been on vacation鈥�
As I said in my , the fare hike is a painful reminder of Brazil鈥檚 two-tiered socioeconomic structure, where rich and poor each have their own health care, schools, transportation, and public safety solutions. Many of the protesters may not use the public health system and may have gone to private schools. But they take buses. And though they may not make the hours-long commute of a maid, waiter or gas-station attendant, they also feel the oppression of a system that provides poorly-managed, inadequate service at a real cost unknown to passengers.
The fare hike reminded them that this is the case in every aspect of life here. And, while workers, especially those with the long commutes, don鈥檛 have time to march in the streets, the students do.
I鈥檓 not saying they鈥檙e a bunch of altruists, marching for workers.
They just feel the inequality in their own skin 鈥� and they know, consciously or not, that a country with a system like this one won鈥檛 go far. That makes a difference in their futures.
Why didn鈥檛 bus-riding students speak up before? . 听When it was a country of haves and have-nots, what was the use of complaining about injustices? Now, when Brazilians feel more alike than ever before, the system鈥檚 logic looks more skewed than ever before. No one invests in change until change begins to look possible.
What will come of all this?
President Rousseff鈥檚 government, and every one that preceded hers, probably back to colonial times, is stitched onto the top of a society where you don鈥檛 know the real costs (nor the real back-room deals) of poorly managed, inadequate public services. She鈥檚 said the protesters鈥� gripes are legitimate and deserve to be heard 鈥� and this is the right thing to say.
But 鈥� how is she going to fix, as fast as Alessandra Orofino would like, the nations鈥檚 schools, hospitals, police, buses, trains, highways, and metro systems? Not to mention airports.
Her government is built on shaky political alliances that involve a lot of bone-tossing, and I imagine she and many other politicians, at all levels, will try tossing bones to the protesters. Already, some mayors have lowered bus fares.
It鈥檚 not about twenty centavos
The world holds many surprises for us: who ever thought it possible to take down the Berlin Wall in 1989? Who ever thought that hundreds of thousands of Brazilians would wake up to the inequities and injustice in their country? In the 30-plus years I鈥檝e lived here, until last week, I thought change would continue to occur gradually. But you can download a song almost instantaneously now, and you can get a movement going without using personalist politics 鈥� collaboratively. Leadership is no longer as crucial as it once was.
So maybe, just maybe, the dialogue that comes out of the unrest will get us somewhere, a little less slowly than I thought. #CHANGEBRAZIL
鈥� Julia Michaels, a long-time resident of Brazil, writes the blog听, which she describes as a constructive and critical view of Rio de Janeiro鈥檚 ongoing transformation.
