Now anger is all around

I was feeling guilty because I went out twice in the same week for a lunch. What does that mean? During the days of strongest protests restaurants and discos were open, with customers, and you don´t need to know someone who may have been at, you don’t. You just need to check for a while your social network accounts: people praising the dissidence during the day and shaking drinks when the sun leaves it. 

I didn’t bring this up to expose those people for a judgment, I’m saying this because it is important to understand that such things happens because we simply are not used to be involved – consciously – in politics. Now we are. Some might say we’ve been since Chavez got elected, but I refuse to it because we were able to spend a partition of dollars per year and with that people went abroad and came even with more bolívares than before. So while this was happening, while the airport were full and shopping centers got crowded, the political conscience was more like the taste for music… but not everyone. Everything that implies disagreement with the government laid on the middle class mostly, and the middle class isn´t growing anymore.

We became the newly poor, like some chavistas are newly rich, especially those with access to preferential dollars. What’s that? The dollar controlled by the government which exchange rate is the lowest and privileged too, but it is practically forbidden for regular people, especially for newly poor. So new poverty is like a complain feast, everyone has a daily story of how extraordinary it is to do something normal. Like the magical realism of literature: finding bread in a bakery, medicines in a drugstore, getting money from an ATM in ten minutes, and so on. Little by little Venezuelans will be the only ones who understand such an exceptional normality.

But not every poor person is actually newly poor. This is important, many people were already poor before the twenty first century socialism and, yes, a very significant group of those gives all support to Maduro because he’s supposed to keep going on with the Chavez legacy. At least that’s what the propaganda wants you to believe. So you have to be poor to actually understand it, and it is a problem for the government: there are more poverty, yes, but also more hate…

You see, if you used to be middle class you don’t take nicely, nor peacefully, the fact that bread became unaffordable with current salaries, and the only chance to get it it´s by doing a two hours line to get the special poor edition of the bread, which is normally called: regulated.  It is a real issue for the newly poor, but let’s talk a little about the other poor: not all of them feel bad at this situation, many of them actually enjoy it even make it profitable.

Old school poor spent decades collecting resentment due to their status. Let’s take an example: a credit card used to be a middle class instrument; forbidden to the poor. Restaurants: owners kept the right whether or not let someone in. Private schools, which continue being very popular: personnel analyzed the parents’ jobs to see if the kid could be in; not because of the money entirely, but the position. Besides that; services: no cable, no phone, no electricity, different food, different brands for product, a whole social class separation… until the revolution arrived and empowered them… spiritually at least and it was almost enough. Everything started to change but not for the poor, but the middle class as I said at the beginning.

Now anger is all around