The PT and hope

The satire caused by the leadership of the PT's involvement in acts of corruption has produced great disappointment and a feeling of all-time unforgivable betrayal. The victory of Lula and the party symbolized a break from the type of power through which the ruling classes maintained their domination and made Brazil one of the most unjust countries in the world or, theologically speaking, a country where social sin that weighs heavily on the poor and offends God is most freely entrenched.

One sort of dream was destroyed, but it did not destroy the ability to dream. That ability is intrinsic to the human being because we see that the facts are not all that is real. The potential is also part of the real — what is not yet but can be. Therefore utopia does not clash with reality. Old E. Durkheim said it well: "the ideal society is not outside of real society — it is a part of it." Utopias are always born from this potential background. Its role — as has already been beautifully said — is to make us walk in such a way that we change the possible into a new reality. This is the challenge of the new PT — to refashion itself from its inward potential.

We can lose faith and this is serious because the sense of what is beyond this life disappears. But we survive. What we can't do is lose hope because that is tragic since it then takes away any reasons to exist and fight. In that case we live only because we don't die — a meaningless life.

One of the most meaningful expressions of hope I found was in the Tate Gallery in London by a painter of the Symbolist school, George Frederic Watts (1817-1904). The painting showed the Earth as a sphere troubled by overwhelming waves and covered by black clouds. Above it sat a woman in a long, completely wet white dress, like someone who had survived a great shipwreck. Strangely, her eyes were bandaged, but she held a harp in her hand with all the strings broken, save one. She plucked that single string with her ears glued to it as if listening to an almost imperceptible melody. It was a melody of hope. Everything had drowned except that melody hidden in the single string. As long as there is still one string, we can reconstruct the melody of the Earth, comfort an afflicted soul, and save the base of a party like the PT.

The PT proposed to accomplish a historical mission — to improve democracy by involving millions of excluded people based on a new way of making policy from the perspective of the victims, seen as a historical subject, aware and organized, with ethical transparency, with proposals for changes and distribution of income, fruit of socially just and ecologically sustainable development. This dream cannot die. It represents a legacy — a possible revolution within democracy, the revolution of the vast majority who can wait no longer.

The current crisis has opened a sore which will become a scar. The recent internal elections have shown the vitality of the base. There are still untested possibilities which shape the renewed profile of the PT. This challenge is for the militants but also for citizens interested in politics subordinated to ethics — ethics that are expressed in nurturing, responsibility, and compassion for everyone, for those who suffer, including the Earth. As Pedro Casaldáliga wrote, "they can take everything from us, except faithful hope." The path still remains.

Free translation from the Spanish provided by AnneFullerton@mybluelight.com. Done in Arlington, VA in cooperation with Refugio del Rio Grande, Texas.