ouroboro
Another year is ending, the Earth has gone around the sun again. It’s only 365 days, 8,760 hours, 525,600 minutes, barely… half a million minutes, which have been enough for the world to move again towards the specter of total war. Major changes are taking place in the European Union, with a turn towards the same ultra-nationalist radicalisms as before, which threaten to end the union, break away from US hegemony and create potential alliances with Russian and Chinese autocracies. Germany goes on to repeat the mistakes of the Weimar Republic, which gave rise to that nefarious subject called Hitler. The United States, the cradle of Western democracy, continues to lose geopolitical ground to Eastern autocracies and has once again opted for the unknowable government of Donald Trump. It threatens political degradation and an isolationist oligocracy. Israel continues to lose the moral war against the Palestinians. Its powerful army has been destroying Gaza’s lives and infrastructure; However, it has not been able to rescue the hostages still held by terrorism. What has been their real goal, to rescue innocent Israelis or to occupy territory? The first is an act of justice, the second is, paradoxically, a new version of the Nazi lebensraum. The world is experiencing a dramatic migration crisis that originates in countries that remain poor because of failed economic systems, whether centralized or neoliberal alike. The current economic models do not work, and just as historically the immutable divine right of the royal bloodlines did not work once, the models could be changed for something better. Societies, so far, continue to repeat the historical vicious circle, like the ouroboros that eats its own tail.
Half a million minutes is also a short time for Peru, which this year has degraded with astonishing and uroboric speed, political life, the social pact and the moral foundations of the government. Building a humble enterprise takes many hours, days, months. It takes Peruvian legislators just a few minutes to transform the Constitution, destroy justice and throw us into the abyss of chaos. With a bullet, just a fraction of a second, end lives, illusions, entire families. Time is still relative. Just as 2016 marked the beginning of the political crisis, 2024 could be known as the end of Peru’s fourth economic boom, another cycle of fallacious and unsustainable prosperity, as historian Jorge Basadre once said.
Historians of the future will one day describe it. They will add the data on the increase in emigration – we have been accumulating millions of emigrants in recent years – they will use the data on poor economic growth, unstoppable inflation (adding the obvious and hidden shrinkflation); the more than sixty billion in reduction of foreign investment and the twenty-three billion in capital flight; the economic distortion generated by the large illegal economies of gold, drugs and corruption that account for almost a third of the country’s economic movement. Historians will also write about the criminal oligarchy that controls the country’s precarious government.
However, it’s not all bad. The heroism of honest men and women who study and struggle to get ahead is preserved. From the humble worker, the lady who keeps the streets clean, the driver who respects the law, the policeman who fulfills his duty, the civil servant at the service of the public, the honest military man with democratic principles, and the businessman who respects democratic rules. They seem few, but they exist. They are the human ocean that sustains a country that refuses to evaporate due to the iniquity of a few.
We begin another short cycle of half a million minutes; it is up to us to use them wisely.
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