Today, shortly before noon, I entered TDMAX from my computer to watch a World Cup match.
I thought there would be one at that time; In recent days there has been no shortage of football that accompanies lunchtime. But not today. The next game started at 2 p.m.
Since I had to have lunch alone, I decided to turn on the news. I haven’t seen national news on television for years, largely because we don’t have a television, although honestly, I’ve always preferred to get information from radio and the written press. Perhaps because of that lack of contact with television news, I retained the naïve impression that an hour of news could help me understand how the world is going.
11:55. The newscast begins. Murders, insecurity, raids, loans drop by drop. An OIJ investigator requests citizen collaboration to identify suspects. Experts explain that there are communities where people live with the permanent possibility of a stray bullet entering their homes. The images show patrol cars, houses seen from outside and people watching from behind closed gates.
Insecurity exists, homicides have increased and all this deserves attention, journalistic analysis and public discussion. But as I listen, I remember why so long ago I stopped watching the news on television: after a while, I am left with the feeling that the only possible conversations are those that occur around fear.
12:30. The international news arrives. The story comes from Venezuela, and the voices have a Spanish accent. There is talk of the recent devastating earthquake, of people still searching for their relatives and of entire communities trying to understand the magnitude of the loss. This is, of course, an immense human tragedy, which deserves all our attention and solidarity.
However, I am surprised to discover that the emotion it produces in me is not very different from the previous news. The scenario changes, but the emotional register does not.
12:45. They talk about the mid-year vacation. There is no mention of rest, or time sharing, or the simple joy of not having to set the alarm for a few days. The story revolves around bicycle and moped accidents, road crashes and burns at home.
At this point, I’m sure it’s not the content that weighs me down, but the language. The form. The feeling that the world, seen through the screen, consists fundamentally of a long list of threats and misfortunes.
There is talk of the recent devastating earthquake, of people still searching for their relatives and of entire communities trying to understand the magnitude of the loss. It is, of course, an immense human tragedy, which deserves all our attention and solidarity.
However, I am surprised to discover that the emotion it produces in me is not very different from the previous news. The scenario changes, but the emotional register does not.
I end with the feeling that the world, seen through the screen, consists fundamentally of a long list of threats and misfortunes.
Perhaps because of my lack of contact with television news, I retained the naive impression that an hour of news could help me understand how the world is going
12:45. They talk about the mid-year vacation. There is no mention of rest, or time sharing, or the simple joy of not having to set the alarm for a few days. The story revolves around bicycle and moped accidents, road crashes, and burns at home.
At this point, I’m sure it’s not the content that weighs me down, but the language.
The form. The feeling that the world, seen through the screen, consists fundamentally of a long list of threats and disgraces.
12:49. The prey arrives.
Then I realize something: I’ve spent almost an hour going over all the ways life can go wrong.
For years I have been accompanied by an intuition shared by urban planners, sociologists and some incorrigible optimists that part of the answer to insecurity consists precisely in doing the opposite of what fear invites us to do: go out, walk, talk to neighbors, learn to recognize the faces of the neighborhood and re-inhabit common spaces.
Jane Jacobs, one of the great thinkers of urban life of the twentieth century, called this the “eyes on the street”: the security that emerges when neighborhoods are alive. But if we spend hours hearing that the world is, above all, a dangerous place, perhaps it is not so strange that it is increasingly difficult for us to go out and inhabit it.
How do we rebuild trust and the desire to live together when so much of our shared experience of country and world takes place in an almost uninterrupted succession of threats?
12:58. Finally, the news begins.
There is a lack of alternate magistrates in the Constitutional Chamber.
The note explains that this situation could affect the effective protection of the fundamental rights of the inhabitants. I wonder if some of the most important things that happen in a society have precisely the problem of not seeming dramatic enough.
At least in the afternoon, I have a meeting, and I have to close the transmission. I am left with the doubt of how the newscast ended. I suspect it will be some time before I find out again.
At 2 o’clock, the match will start. I will follow it, of course, intertwined with the report I am finishing. In the midst of so much information that pushes us inward, we still need a reminder that the world is not only inhabited with caution. We also live with others.