A University College Student Association Magazine
CULTURE
9
(Un)blissful Ignorance by Elisa Uccello
As a child, growing up in the parched Midwest of Brazil, I was surrounded by a very convincing illusion of progress. Over half of the Brazilian population is black, so it’s weird how few of my parents’ colleagues were black though they worked at a public institution as large as the National Central Bank. Conversations about homophobia happened occasionally in my household; coincidentally the topic always came up right before a gay cousin or friend came to visit. My mother, a proud feminist, always talked to my sister and me about how we had to work to become economically independent and never submit to a man’s idea of us. When I said a bad word, she would tell me that’s not how a lady should act. As the years go by, we want to expect tomorrow to be better, more equal, more just than today. Yet, 2 and a half years ago, I found myself sitting motionless in front of the television. It only took the two seconds the reporter needed to pronounce the name of the winner of the presidential race for my country to regress half a century.
"As the old saying goes, ignorance is bliss. So how blissful my home country must be" After 12 years of corruption scandals dominating the news, the population was anything but happy with the governing party. Therefore, as the 2018 elections approached, most of the people I knew seemed pretty convicted about who they were going to support. These people, I must add, are educated, middle to high-class Brazilians who have traveled to numerous countries, and have access to any and all news services, books, television programs, and media outlets. Yet they elected a man named Jair Bolsonaro for the presidency of one of the biggest
countries in the world. 58 million votes. 58 million people left their houses, went to a voting booth, and selected this man to be their leader. As the old saying goes, ignorance is bliss. So how blissful my home country must be. “She is not worth raping; she is very ugly. Not my type." “I would be incapable of loving my son if he was homosexual. I would prefer my son died in a car accident than showed up with some bloke with a mustache.” “If I see two men kissing each other on the street, I’ll beat them up.” “I’m in favor of torture, you know that.” “My son wouldn’t fall in love with a black woman. I don’t run that risk because my sons were very well educated.” “I’m sorry for the dead (victims of COVID-19), I’m sorry. But we’re all going to die one day, everyone here will die. There’s no point running away from it, running away from reality. You need to stop being a country of fagg*ts.” All of these words came out of the mouth of a man that now serves as the executive chief of a country with over two hundred million people. A country with unparalleled natural beauty, with a warm and welcoming culture, with renowned parties, brilliant art, delicious food, incredible diversity, and unlimited potential. But plagued by ignorance.
"There are moments when we must let ourselves feel others’ pains" The question I asked myself as I sat in front of the TV all these months ago is the same I’ve asked myself every day since Bolsonaro
was elected: Why? Why did these 60 million people vote for him? Why aren’t they bothered enough by his claims? And this is not just Brazil. Despite the misfortune that my country is facing, discrimination exists everywhere. It is an issue everywhere. We have an optimistic tendency to look at it in a relative manner, always comparing how it is now to how it was in the past, or how it is here to how it is in poorer countries, but this relativity builds an illusion. I don’t think all the people who voted for Bolsonaro are as racist, sexist, homophobic, and overall hateful as he is. I think most of them are simply ignorant. Ignorance isn’t simply a lack of knowledge, but a lack of acknowledgment. We know there are billions of people that have nothing to eat, we know of the deaths of people of color who have done nothing wrong, we know that young girls are being raped and then called liars in court, we know there are gay kids being kicked out of their homes because of dogmatic parents. We have knowledge of a lot of misery that we don’t have to face. And although it is true that to acknowledge this misery all the time does nothing but make us guilty of everything we have that others don’t, there are moments when we need to sit with it. There are moments when we must let ourselves feel others’ pains. Because if we don’t, progress will forever remain an illusion. As the old saying goes, ignorance is bliss. But it is also an antonym of all of that which makes us worthy of our praised benevolence. So let us choose awareness over false bliss. Let us choose compassion over comfort. There is no other way forward. This is not about Brazil. It is about humanity.
