Geek By Proxy

There are people who touch our hearts just by entering a room. People with such selflessness and genuine love for the world that it’s almost impossible not to feel good around them. I had such a friend. And this New Year’s Eve I lost such a friend.

Gonçalo Cardoso Dias was a fellow gamer, but that doesn’t cover the miriad of things he was. He was a dedicated architect, a talented artist but most of all he was a dear, dear friend. A friend I got used to seeing around my dinner table on Sunday nights, a friend with whom I laughed and built entire worlds with. There was a peaceful sweetness about him, a kind of loving acceptance of the world around him that fascinated me. During the hard days that followed his death I met his family and a lot of his friends. Every single person I met had been touched by Gonçalo in a special, loving and personal way. Because Gonçalo always saw us as individual persons with our own funny quirks and interests. He remembered them and value them, surprising us with the care he took in every thought he had about us.

He was but thirty, which leaves us with the bitter taste of wondering what he could have done and what people could he have touched, if his lifespan had been longer. However, at least as far as I’m concerned, there is also the joy and pride of having had the privilege of knowing him and shared a small portion of his life.

I’m honoured to have called myself your friend, Gonçalo. I know that you will remain alive in my memory, as long as I live. After that, who knows, maybe we’ll meet again and share laughs again. Farewell, sweet, sweet boy…

The Portuguese Republic reached her first century today. There have been good times and bad times during these past 100 years, but the principle is still the same. There are no special instituted privileges attached to your family name. Everyone is born equal under the law.

Of course that doesn’t mean that we all have equal opportunities automatically, or that money or connections don’t make a difference to where we’ll end up in life. However, there’s a stated hope that it will be possible for everyone to start in the same place and get ahead through their own merit alone. It’s huge collective breakthrough in any society, when it stops being normal that a small group of people get a set of special rights and immunities simply for the sake of tradition. It makes a world of difference when we stop accepting the division between first and second class citizens within a nation.

To me, it’s not enough to be a Republic. To reach the full merit of hope in a better nation, that Republic has to be a Democracy also. People need to have a say in how they’re governed and by whom. They’ll choose wrong sometimes, but that’s their privilege. Having a choice is more important than choosing right. And if we are true democrats, that is the only thing we don’t question. Right or wrong is a relative position. Choice is absolute. The price to pay is to accept that our choices won’t always be in line with the majority ruling. But you can’t always get what you want.

The first republicans believed in this also. In many ways they were dramatically ahead of their times and let enthusiasm curb their rationality. It led to the downfall of Democracy. But they sowed those first seeds and made it almost impossible to return to a regime where your future was more dependent on a genetic lottery than on anything else. My homage to them for that. May the Republic last forever.

I haven’t written for a while. This may happen at some time or another, because life tends to get in the way of our best intentions and my blog has been low on my priority list for some time. However, one of the advantages of our righteous indignation is that it might prompt us to action

The dogmatic use of labels in american culture to define and classify people always seemed to me a funny quirk that only added to the amused acceptance of the tough negotiation between different ethnicities the USA were forced to make. Today, they seem to me just dangerous.

I’ve been reading about a story of a New Jersey Med School student who got into trouble and was suspended because he defined himself as a white african american. Paulo Serôdio is a 45 year-old student, born and raised in Mozambique,  now a naturalized USA citizen. For all intents and purposes, and forgetting the color of his skin, he is an african who acquired american citizenship. And he happens to be white (or at least more white than black).

In a cultural exercise in class, when asked to define himself, he said he was a white african american. Some of his black colleagues took offense in this and the case found its way to the dean’s office and eventually to his suspension from school. In an attempt to explain his position, Serôdio wrote an article in the school’s newspaper. The comments I have seen label this article as racist and stereotyped. And I don’t get it.

I read the article and the positions Serôdio defends seem everything but racist. No matter how wide the range of skin color among the so called “latinos” in the US, the fact is that most of time, I would be classified as one, even before I opened my mouth and spoke. By the way, my native language is latin based, just like the spanish most central and southern americans speak. For most portuguese native speakers, the accent is much the same as a “latino”, when they speak english. Just ask Joaquim de Almeida who doesn’t seem to get any other roles than those of a “latino”.

I live in Portugal. From a very early age, I remember listening to racist comments from random people around me and not getting it. I was fortunate enough to be born to an extremely tolerant set of parents and the rest of my environment was also conducive to that tolerance. So when I heard a racist comment made around me, it felt alien and wrong. Furthermore, as I studied Portugal’s history, it dawned on me that the portuguese were extremely good at two things: sailing from one place to another and making babies with whomever.

Today I know that between the people who came and settled in Portugal (Celts, Phoenician, Goths, Greeks, Romans and Moors) and the places the portuguese sailed to and settled in (Ceuta, Cape Verde, Guinea, St. Thomas and Prince, Angola, Mozambique, Brazil, India, Malasia, Timor, Macao, etc.), defining ourselves as white, black, brown or yellow, is a visual artifice. It is known today that northern africa is in our blood, in our words and in our music. In at least 10% of us there are sub-saharian DNA markers. Without excusing the abuses that did took place during the portuguese colonization process, not forgetting that the portuguese were the first to capture and sell african slaves, the fact is that I am descended from both opressors and opressed. Although I would be classified as caucasian, mainly because of my immediate family, the fact is that my skin is darker than that. There is a hint of India and Northern Africa in my facial features and tone of skin. I have two sisters, one of which is even darker than me, while the other might almost be considered milk skinned. And I love it that it is so.

I love the fact that the mix of cultures that permeated my own is fully expressed not only in my language (there are a lot of arabic words in portuguese, and some celtic and gothic based too) and in the traditional music of my country (fado being the best known but not the only example), but also in the miriad variations of skin color and facial features around me. Labels don’t make much sense to me. Dogmatic separation of people by groups, be either by race, language, ethnicity, or any other criteria seems to me stupid and senseless. It is an artificial crutch for our fears, a prop to inflate our own ego or exarcebated sense of self. It is not real and tends to crumble in face of true and genuine human relations.

I hope that the New Jersey courts have enough sense to understand this. I hope that racism and self-righteous indignation don’t prevail ever, no matter where they come from.

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. ” (Martin Luther King)

December 10th, 1948 marks one of the most inspired moments of Mankind as a whole. The UN General Assembly proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, stating in its preamble its most ambitious affirmation: “the recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”

It wasn’t the first text in the genre. In 1789, on both sides of the Atlantic, two different charters were created, both with the goal of establishing a set of inalienable rights of man: the American Bill of Rights and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Even before that, as early as the 13th century,  the Magna Carta already established a set of rights that every subject to the British Crown would have assured, effectively binding the decision and power of the monarch.

In 1948, however, the universal scope of these rights reached its peak. Every single member of Mankind, regardless of gender, race, culture, religion, economic conditions, nationality or any other differenciating factor was recognized these rights, above any creed, government or any other decision power in their lifes.

For all due purposes, being part of Mankind took precedence over any other bond to any other social institution. Discrimination was condemned in all its forms, the right to property, privacy, freedom of association, religion, opinion and thought consecrated as paramount to the full development of the human condition.

Yet, sixty years later, the situation is only marginally better. Human Rights ONG’s are still profusely busy, having ample ground to dennounce abuse. In some cases, the situation has worsen rather than improved. And it’s our fault, our collective fault that it is so.

Whenever a political, economic or diplomatic decision has to be made, human rights are constantly shoved to the bottom of the priority list. They’re still looked upon as an utopic ideal, good for show, but totally impractical. They’re the first to be trampled, because they’re never part of a quick fix or an easy solution. Short term solutions never care for the whole picture and governments and corporations tend to go for short term fixes. Or, worse, they look at human rights as a huge threat to their power, since it inhibits them from the use blind force. And, in most of the western world, they’re the governments we choose and the corporations we support.

Even in our daily lifes, we look at human rights as something remote and detached from ourselves, something that has no bearing in our private lives. But every single time we shun somebody, because he looks, thinks or believes different, we’re trampling human rights. Every single time we label someone, based on a differenciating characteristic, as a person of “non-interest”, every time we refuse to know someone based on a superficial evaluation, everytime we let our own selfish interests be more important than someone’s suffering or discomfort, we’re trampling human rights. Everytime we refuse to listen to an opinion, merely because of who the person is, everytime we feel we have the right of feeling superior to anyone else, we are disrespecting human rights.

I said before that I really believe that we can only change the world one person at a time. It is true in this case also. Starting with ourselves, we can build a personal code of ethics that never falls second to any decision in our lives. We limit ourselves to the that framework and never surrender it and we demand to be governed by those who feel the same way. Ever respecting, though, the right of others to feel differently…