Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro: 35oC, very hot, sunny and unstable weather.
I would like to have said it was just a typical Sunday, but it wasn’t. Okay, I played chess, the best of 3, with Yasmin again, and again, I lost. I bought lunch for Yasmin as I don’t like to cook on a Sunday; normal, too.
I did exercise at the end of Leme; normal.
Later that day, I took Yasmin back to her mother’s, normal.
I stayed by myself on a Sunday afternoon, normal too. So what was different?
The first and most important event or trauma, depending on how you look at it, was the taxi driver we used to go to Botafogo to take Yasmin home passed over a fake, dud R$20 Real note. I was given R$50 Reais, and part of the change was a note of 20 Reais.
Obviously, at that moment, I hadn’t noticed. Only later, when I decided to drink a glass of wine at the bar next to where I live when I paid, the waiter returned, telling me it was false.
I was a little embarrassed, to say the least, and apologized and paid in another way. This was the first event.
The second was when I returned to Copacabana from dropping Yasmin off in Botafogo. As the bus was leaving the tunnel and entering Barata Ribeiro at the beginning of Copacabana, there was a police roadblock in the middle of the main street with at least twenty young boys between fourteen and twenty years of age sitting on the ground with shirts off surrounded by another twenty heavily armed police with guns out etc.
It was obvious that these boys were caught robbing and mugging people on the beach and in Copacabana.
The power of numbers, if it were one or two, there is a chance to fight back or defend yourself, but more than that, it becomes complicated. Rio de Janeiro is infested with the new generation of poor, illiterate generation of chicken thieves who don’t know the difference between right and wrong. It is a social cancer in Rio de Janeiro, and it is only getting worse. How can a city and a country have a future in such a situation?
When I got off the bus and entered my street, Duvivier, another teenage boy/man, was running down the street, and two men on motorbikes were chasing after him.
The fake R$20.00 note, and probably the plethora of street crimes on the beaches that day, got me thinking and reminded me of when the new president of Brazil was president before and the feeling of impunity that was then and is now coming back again. We are not just talking about the lower classes; it is on all levels, from the country’s president to all other layers of society.
This worries me; nowadays, having just a simple, minimally comfortable life in Rio is becoming increasingly difficult.
I have two Carioca friends who moved to Sao Paulo to live because of work, and both say they don’t want to return to Rio. When they come to visit their families in Rio, they feel the violence; it is too apparent. Thirty years ago, when Jessica was a baby, I had a consultancy contract with a company in Sao Paulo and had to go and live there.
Every weekend, I would come to Rio to spend time with her, and when I arrived in Rio, I could feel the aggressiveness and a sense of violence in the air; you could cut it with a knife; it was so thick. And this was thirty years ago!
We who live in Rio are anaesthetized to this toxic situation as we are here and immersed in it full-time. I call this the little goldfish in a glass bowl syndrome. Unfortunately, we get used to situations that any average person would think are completely wrong and unacceptable.
This new government that was in power for sixteen years until four years ago and is now back is reeking of incompetence, corruption, unpunishment, dishonesty, hypocrisy, and disloyalty to the Brazilian people. It is a disgrace to such a special country and people.
In bed by 9:00 p.m.
Thank you.
Thanks for reading my blog. Check out my other posts and share your thoughts in the comments.
Richard
