Many could consider the following as the typical middle class complaint. This is an issue indeed, on which I've have talked about on several entries. However, recent events made me think that I haven’t said the last word about it yet. If someone asked me what is the hardest part of living in this country under the current situation my answer wouldn’t be the fear about the upcoming and past government mad ideas; or the food shortages, or inflation or the limits to our basic human rights. None of that, those issues are the result of inefficient government policies and from where I see it; they are not hard to fix.The hardest part of living in this country under the current situation is the personal relationships you establish or not with the people who find themselves in the other side of the political spectrum. It’s already an old story commented by the news over and over again: families separated, friends split and so on. It had even became one of the flags (if not the main one) of the white hand movement (students). For me, it’s a tragedy.
In my case, my family seemed to have always similar political opinions so it never broke as a consequence of the revolution. My grandmother supported the regime for longer than the very few members of my family that were initially “chavistas” did, and it became really annoying especially during the crisis of 2002. Was kind of weird to see her happily watching the state channel during those days, but we just decided to ignore it and never engaged in pointless discussions with her. And at the university I was never able to establish a close friendship with a Chavista and it never passed of a few polite coffee talks; perhaps because there are only a very few government supporters in my campus. Yet, it was incredible hard for me to come back to class after some major political event or crisis and even look at the Chavez supporters at their faces.
More than once I considered them just very stupid people who are being paid by the government. For me they were not legitimate supporters and believers of a cause, and if they were, they were simply “crazy” – “Who could in their sane judgment support this madness?” – I asked to myself over and over again.
Especially from 2002 till 2004 I developed the tendency to look at the world as one generally divided between the ones like me and the “others”, the chavistas. The “good” and the “bad ones”. On some occasions I was even afraid when I happened to meet even a small group of “chavistas” gathering in one street.
It’s so easy to talk about peace outside a conflict and fight about peace outside a conflict. The hate goes different from watching it than from actually experience it. When you happen to be, for one reason or another, at one side of an extreme polarized situation and the events comes so quickly one after another that you don’t have time to think about them; the hate grows up inside you as easy as brushing your teeth and you demonize the other side in an incredible way that definitely goes beyond reality; even if at first, it had reasons to be demonized.
About three years ago I was at a protest just near by home and we built a barricade for blocking one of my neighborhood entrances. Most of the cars that approached to the protest just turned the way back and use the other entrance; also since they were riots everywhere in Caracas, the traffic was extremely low anyway. But one car found it difficult to turn the way back and it tried to pass the barricade for one side, the nerves were very high and the people (myself included) ran against the car to block completely its possibilities to pass the barricade.
It was crazy. Before I knew it I was right next to the drivers window and I noticed the face of a young guy just confused and visible scared trying to fix the situation but the people were in such a crazy state of mind that if it wasn’t because of some man that stopped the madness; the situation could had developed in a much worse result.
This guy inside the car looked straight in my eyes like saying: “What the hell are you doing?”. I step back feeling dazed in a way that the images of the men trying to make the people step back passed by in slow motion for me. I walked back home immediately, terrified and ashamed of what I just had done. Years later, I’m still very ashamed of that, If I could only tell this guy how sorry I am.
That day I suddenly understood the real nature of wars, and conflicts and all those scenes that you comfortable sitting in front of your TV just comment that “those people are animals”… If you could only feel for one day what those people are feeling.
It’s not enough by saying the hate it’s a Chavez offer and our feelings are his fault. What it amazes me the most is not that it’s a Chavez offer, is not the speech about “those oligarchs that we are going to turn them into dust”; is that the people are buying this offer even if they are against the regime. After all, is not natural to a guns offer with flowers in return.
The path to heal that extreme hate is rough, takes time, takes pride and it's not an open offer to everybody as the hate is. It isn’t a matter of suddenly decide to be a better person and love everybody and sing the peace anthem. And unless the opportunity of being forced (because it is also a lie that you would do it voluntarily) to establish a personal contact with the ones you consider enemies show up; the hate and the ideas around it will remain the same. But like I said, at least for the Venezuelans, the market of these opportunities is not as wide as the offer of hate is.