Opinion Sur Joven

I see it on TV and my suspicion is confirmed. Our society gets more violent every day. We should figure out its cause and its consequences, and what causes what. On the day I’m writing this editorial, some train services have been suspended, therefore impatient people started to damage everything, throwing stones and making a non-pacific demonstration. The police entered with shields, riot control agents and rubber bullets. People started to throw stones at them.

What causes what? Damaging trains is violence, but the conditions of public transport in Argentina are violence as well.
I remembered an anecdote. A friend of mine was driving, when a young man on a motorcycle came across her way and she unintentionally hit him. He was unconscious and she was desperate: “You have no idea what it feels like when you think that maybe you’ve just killed someone”, she told me.
But, apart from that terrible sensation, she had to put up with something else: the family of the young man -who lived near the place of the accident- came out and shouted “murderer, murderer” at her, while throwing stones at her… My friend had an accident. Does that make her a murderer?

I’m sorry to tell these stories to our Latin American readers, but maybe they’ll serve as counterexamples: situations we shouldn’t imitate.
A few days ago, a soccer goalkeeper scored a goal against his own team; a group of supporters started to beat him (something similar happened in Colombia with Escobar’s murder). Some players of a team which had lost a game came out of the stadium and found their cars damaged. A minister went for a walk in her province and got beaten by protesters; you can’t beat a person just because she has a different ideology. A tragedy takes place in a disco or a theater and the mayor is accused of murder...

We’re living in a society that gets more and more violent, where a person who makes a mistake is considered a “son of a bitch”. We can’t keep on criminalizing people who’ve failed at something, mistaken people, people who have different ideologies.
And, at the same time, we must acknowledge this boiling point has been generated because nobody listens to people, because limits are defied, and only when someone reacts violently do solutions appear.
Can we solve conflicts in a better way? That’s the challenge. Let’s stop looking for culprits and, please, enough with the violence, on both sides. We must seek the way to solve these problems right away, before it’s too late.

Pablo Winokur