I was sleeping and was woken up
I found myself, in a strange and crazy world….
When I started to understand it
A little,
It was time to go back to sleep again!
(Mario Quintana)
With this poem from my dear Mario Quintana I start by saying that only now I’m getting into the phase of comprehending a little about the world. I say this not because of my mild age ( I wish it was), but for the complexity of understanding a world where the normal build atomic bombs, and the ones who don’t follow the rules of the normal are considered crazy.
Even though throughout my life, my sub-conscience already alerted that this was a serious topic, my conscious about the crazy only came to afloat in 2013 when I was impacted by the work of the Journalist Daniela Arbex. “Brazilian Holocaust: The book tells a verdict story from the Hospital Colonia in Barbacena – MG, where in the 1970’s and 1980’s, approximately 60.000 (sixty thousand) people of diverse parts of the world died. The patients were taken to the biggest hospice in Brazil in trains that delivered loads in the back of the institution. So, that’s where the expression “ crazy train” which means a crazy thing came from. The book is a result of a careful investigation and was able to count with testimonies of ex-workers and survivers of the true terror story endorsed by the government, their families and society in general. About 70% of the people who were taken to the hospital had no mental trouble at all. They were the ones who weren’t adequate: thieves, prostitutes, homosexuals, girls who had lost their virginities before marriage, wives that been left and had been sent there not to have their voices heard, timid teens, sad children… To the ones that really needed the psychiatric treatment, the situation of abandonment and maltreatment worsened the problem, making the death numbers rise. Death was a good business, once the commerce of bodies and organs to medical colleges also existed at the same place.
Well, after coming in contact with the story of this genocide that happened in my country, in my state, in my epoch, I couldn’t be impassive and pretend that everything runs smoothly in the humans’ kingdom. My first thought was: “ Folks, but this was just the other day! How is it possible? So, this means we haven’t learnt anything. Haven’t we evolved? After the first moments of disbelief, I started to reflect about how much this happens on a daily basis without us noticing our detachment of human nature. We differ ourselves from the other creations for the fact that we’re able to think. And by thinking we act in a destructive way like no other animal on earth.
Meanwhile, human beings, thinkers, are able to hurt the people who are similar to them in many different ways, destroy everything that we depend on for living, get things together until we can no longer keep it; among many other insanities. And perhaps the biggest craziness is to want everyone to be this way.
Let’s continue our thinking, being apart from our paradigms. What is normal in the society that we live in? What is this normality according to our individual values?
How many times do we get carried away by this insane wave and behave like irrational animals? For example, up to what point is it normal for people to get together to pebble, to torture, to drag and to kill? This already happened more than 2000 years ago and someone of infinite knowledge came to alert us that something wasn’t right. It’s beyond religion. It’s irrational, immoral and self-destructive.
It’s necessary to stop and breath before we wake up and follow the normal. Let’s count to twenty, to a thousand if that is the case, but we can think for ourselves.
If the normal take in consideration the conservation of the human life, the harmonic familiarity, the preservation of the planet, the union among the peoples, the equality among the people. I’m sorry to say, the future of humanity depends on the crazy.
For being rational beings, we have what nobody can take away from us: the capacity to decide about what type of human beings we want to be. I must tell you that as far as I can tell, between normal and crazy I’d rather be crazy.
(Author: Rosilene Ávila / Translator: Lara Magalhães)
