Читать книгу The Notebook - José Saramago - Страница 24

That there is a crisis in the family is something nobody would dare to deny, however much the Catholic Church might seek to disguise the disaster with a mellifluous rhetoric that doesn’t even deceive itself. Nor can we deny that many so-called traditional values of family and social cohabitation have gone down the drain, dragging with them even those values that ought to be defended from the constant attacks coming from the highly conflictive society in which we live; nor that today’s schools—the successors to those old schools that for many generations were tacitly charged (in the absence of anything better) with making up for the educational failings of the family unit—are paralyzed, riddled with contradictions and mistakes, disoriented by successive pedagogical methods that are not in fact pedagogical methods, that too often are no more than passing fashions or amateur experiments doomed to fail. They are doomed by the very lack of intellectual maturity of those who formulated them, without being able to formulate or answer a question that to my mind is essential: “What kind of citizens are we trying to produce?”

The social landscape is not a pretty sight. Strangely, our more or less worthy rulers do not seem as concerned with these matters as they should be, perhaps because they think that since these are universal problems the solution—whenever it is found—will be automatic, for everyone.

I disagree. We live in a society that seems to have made violence a way of social interaction. The aggression that is inherent in this species of ours, and which at times we think that we have managed to control through education, burst brutally up from the depths in the past twenty years, manifesting itself right across the social sphere, prompted by modes of idleness that have stopped using simple hedonism to condition the consumer’s mentality and instead use violence: led by television, where ever more perfect fake blood gushes out every hour of the day and night, and video games that are like instruction manuals for teaching total intolerance and perfect cruelty, and, because all of this is connected, the avalanche of ads for erotic services, welcomed by all newspapers, including the more right-thinking ones, while they cram their editorial pages (if any still remain?) with hypocritical instructions to society on how it should behave. Do I exaggerate? Then explain to me how it is we have reached the point where many parents are afraid of their children—those sweet adolescents, our hope for tomorrow, from whom the word “no” from a father or mother grown tired of irrational demands instantly unleashes a fury of insults, of outrageous behavior, of aggression. Physical aggression, in case you had any doubt about my meaning. Many parents harbor their worst enemies in their own home: their children. Ruben Darío innocently wrote of “that divine treasure, youth.” He would not write so today.