52 The Patriarchs

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The Patriarchs

I have been on Earth for quite a long and besides have registered my own limitations and frustations throughout my way, I have also observed the sad results of human aggressions, always derived from selfishness, the great creator of misery, not only for the morals of those who provoke them, but also for those who suffer with it.

Although I was only five years old then, I can recall clearly the last moments of the Second World War, this sad happening has left undeletable scars in my childhood, for at the same time my parents broke up and as innocent as I was, thought the dissolution of my home was due to the misunderstanding of the nations.

I felt indefense in the middle of everything that was happening, so insecure that when I was alone in a small room in my grandparent’s house I cried in silence, praying for God to bring my parents together, so that I could have back my home, my yard, my security.

I thought it strange that the war hadn’t touched the other houses for the people laughed and the children played happily in the neighbor’s houses.

When I was enrolled in primary school, I went to school feeling like a being apart from Creation. On their way, those children spoke of their fathers as if they were heroes. I went on silently, as a foreigner does in the middle of people who speak another language. There was this Sunday, when my father went to my grandparents´and I was deeply happy to see him again. After some hours of pleasant moments together, when everybody talked lively, I came close to him and asked him lovely:
“ Dad, can I have a soccer ball?”
After grinning at me, he answered:
“ Don’t be silly, boy! I am sick and tired of giving my other kids these balls and all they can do is stabbing their penknives on them.”
That revelation came to me as a bomb. He was my father, only mine, how could he have other kids?

But I have realized through my life that many other people lived big problems.

I have met along the way, starving mothers trying hard to feed their hungry kids, whose inaudible crying, didn’t bother the passer-by worried about his own problems.
I have seen a child running, completely naked, whose body showed the explosion of human selfishness in the spotlights of such cruel war.

Not far from there, neither chronologically, nor geographically, I have seen the extinction of indefense populations in the name of security, and the results have shown little shoes and dolls among the destruction. On the other hand, the so-called leader, the patricarch of this people, preferred to see his people vanish by an incisive war attack to stepping out power in a strategic fleeing, announcing he would never step out the throne, on the contrasensus that action was on the behalf of the love of his people.

Just like epidemies ask for actions from science for the extinction of such maladies, the world asks for help against the monstrous actions of these tourists of the evil, that spread mischief through their sweat polluting the atmosphere of the planet. They also survive from the “eggs” offered by the birds faraway kept far from the unbreakable regions of their power; they vampirize them, without kissing them, keeping a defensive position, and when they think it is necessary they put them under the target of their missiles to shoot them down.

The truth is that, unfortunately, such anomalous characteristics are still part of a great part of human beings that somehow, spread wickedness, fadding down smiles, destroying homes and sacrifying those who are subordinated to them. I remember an old saying: “ You only know a real scoundrel by giving him some power.” Yes, they make the biggest mistakes, sacrifying their fellows under the name of love, that surely isn’t born from good intentions.

There are those who make slaves, others who exploit feeling and some others that under the name of a special moment of love, end up saying good-bye to children that have nothing else but their tears in this sad moment of departure.

As great fires start over a small match head, many of the world catastrophes have begun in a hatred duel, apparently without consequences. We will never reach true peace while disrespecting the indenfense, for they are, undoubtly, a test for us to measure our need of using the rod.

Just yesterday, the convulsive crying of an infant called my attention. Feeling pitty, I got close to her gate and with my hands beyong the fence, I cherished her curly hair, and then asked her why she was crying so much. She looked at me as if she were alone in the world and answered:
“ My dad went away...”
“ Was your dad very angry when he left ? “ I asked.
“ No” , she replied. “ He sad he was in love with some body else.”

All my past came to me. I looked at that suffering child. I realized that scared infant look was afraid of the explosion of a great war that had just began. So, I got on my knees, right in front of her, and I confess, that felling pitty, I also cried.

Author: Alvaro Basile Portughesi - São Paulo/SP – Brazil
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