This has been a very depressing week. Regardless of the many fair causes being taken by the protesters to the street, as a Brazilian living in São Paulo, I was worried since the beginning that the whole thing would turn into the mess we can see now. And while I sympathize what many of these causes, the lack of a proper, unified list of demands makes the whole thing completely worthless in the best case, and quite dangerous in the worst.
On the bright side, it was funny the watch the national and foreign media trying to understand what was going on. And then my own friends and coworkers who supported the whole thing trying to explain what they thought it was about (each one with a different explanation).
> And while I sympathize what many of these causes, the lack of a proper, unified list of demands makes the whole thing completely worthless in the best case, and quite dangerous in the worst.
"Represent us, not yourselves" is the message delivered by these sorts of protests. It's more effective than an itemized list.
> And then my own friends and coworkers who supported the whole thing trying to explain what they thought it was about (each one with a different explanation).
This makes perfect sense amongst people who aren't being represented at all well by their government - the government isn't just doing one thing badly, so of course there isn't agreement over what they're doing wrong. It says something kind of ugly about you that you think it's "funny."
It is mind blowing to me that in a world where the internet makes it so easy to aggregate democratically the wishes of the masses, corrupt politicians that neglect the people they represent still thrive. If everybody would spent 10% of the time they spend on Facebook in order to express on a website the problems that they would like to be solved by the state and the solution to these problems that they support, the world we live in would be a much better one. I would guess that the value corruption takes away from the global economy is much higher than the value created by all of the startups that pretend to disrupt economies. Do you want to solve a global problem? Please solve corruption.
On the bright side, it was funny the watch the national and foreign media trying to understand what was going on. And then my own friends and coworkers who supported the whole thing trying to explain what they thought it was about (each one with a different explanation).