Weakness of the interview with the President
Once again, the President of the Republic (as the Prime Minister had done) overestimated the effects of teachers’ strikes, forgetting those of strikes in other professions, such as doctors. The emphasis on the threat to the right to education overshadowed the threat to other rights, omitted in the interview, such as the right to life, the right to health, etc. Well, in a hierarchical sense, I would always put the right to life first, then the right to health, and the others after that. By comparison with the situation of students without classes or the consequent disorganization of the family, bearing in mind that there is currently a lack of health agents, one can see the consequence of the doctors’ strike: in a direct way, the right to health was called into question and, indirectly, the right to life. Calculate how many appointments and surgeries were postponed; what is the severity of the situations that were postponed (days, weeks or months); verify the degree of aggravation of health and the suffering caused; check the inconvenience of those who live in villages and travel 20 or 30km to have a consultation, etc. Why didn’t Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa mention this?
Luis Filipe Rodrigues, Santo Tirso
TINA
There’s no going back, they say we live under the sponsorship of TINA (the one that says “there is no alternative”) but, it’s obvious, it’s a bullshit conversation. There is always an alternative, the problem is to perceive it and, even more complicated, to manage to create synergies capable of putting the thing in motion.
Our way of life encourages the fragmentation of the group. We stay at home looking at rectangles with images (televisions, computers, cell phones) believing that through these virtual windows we communicate with the world. Maybe it’s even true, maybe there is communication, but it turns out to be sterile in social terms. If there is any benefit in the process, it will tend to be individual.
And that is our fate: to be individuals with bulging bellies and a navel at the tip, which we contemplate in raptures, convinced that the world does not deserve us or, in the most desperate cases, that we do not deserve the world. When we go out in large groups and express disagreement with some less attractive aspect of TINA, we are left with the feeling that we have done something socially radical, but in the end, TINA always ends up laughing.
Rui Silvares, Cova da Piedade
A country of sounds
The sly matrix of this country has once again come to the surface; the reaction of the Portuguese Episcopal Conference to the report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Abuses of Minors gives us the guarantee of the continuity of secrecy, dissimulation and the possibility of continuing to sweep rubbish under the rug. Sousa Tavares wrote about this in Express: “I know that politicians are going to flee from this like the devil from the cross, but unfortunately, the devil is on the side of the cross and the cross does not want to exorcise him by itself… we must lose fear of the Catholic Church.”
As had already happened in the case of submarines, this wreck is also that of the Public Prosecutor’s Office (MP), which for decades saw or heard nothing about the matter. It would be good for politicians who are always afraid of being included in some obscure MP inquiry, conveniently frozen until it is released in the timing certainly for yet another unpunished violation of the secrecy of justice, they would also lose fear of the MP and legislate in the sense that this pillar of justice could be effectively supervised, something that does not happen given the composition of the Superior Council of the Public Ministry. Until that happens, we will continue to be a land of sane people, where it is more important to appear than to be.
José Cavalheiro, Matosinhos