Contemporary Love

It's been a long time since I've been here. Meanwhile, many stories I heard, many stories I wrote.

I finally did an assignment about the minimum wage. In fact, I had wanted to do it for a very long time so I gave the idea to my newspaper, they accepted it, and I did it. The article ran three pages and, in addition to all the statistical information and economic explanations, contained stories about real people struggling to survive. What they told me was sad, very sad, but was not a surprise. I have to admit though that I was very surprised by the number of people that didn't speak, giving up at the last minute, because they were afraid of having problems with their bosses.

Although a country where the official dictatorship ended 30 years ago, Portugal is still a country that lives, in many aspects, under fear. And that continues to shock me. When I was a little younger I used to think that these people were cowards because they failed to help themselves or a collective cause (better salaries, better lives, better companies, better profits, stronger economies). Today, I have a different idea. Probably because when some of the times I decided to speak out loud about what I considered unfair I got hurt (though, looking back now, not as much as I could have been). So, today, even shocked, even sad, even not agreeing that silence is the better answer, I can understand people that struggle quietly to survive in order to avoid hurting their children and families.

And all the stories these people told me for my minimum wage article made me think about something completely different but that somehow relates to it: silent dictatorship. You know, all the things you have to avoid doing or saying, for your own health, even if nobody tells you to. And I am not speaking only about people that struggle to survive at a basic level (they just refreshed this in my mind). I am speaking about all the things that go with and lurk behind surviving in any environment. All the fearful situations that we all help to create that result in unfair things. And yes, I can honestly say that I hear a silent dictatorship in most places.

How many people do you know that are good professionals but have miserable salaries compared to their equally good professional colleagues that do exactly the same work? And how many of these people have you seen quietly accepting this until, one day, they revolt and they say everything they think with the wrong delivery because they've reached their limit ? What did you observe then? Most of the time they got more hurt, right? If not directly - because nobody can fire anybody without strong reason - indirectly, like suddenly nobody gives them work to do, or gives them always the same kind of work, until they get tired and depressed.

Four week ago, for example, in my country, two women decided to speak about the things they considered unfair in their jobs. Their boss (a woman - never think a woman is more sensitive) decided to seek revenge and put them working in the garage of the store without being allowed to come outside. They were basically treated as if they were in jail. Cruel, right? Also rude but at least obvious enough to draw attention to this ridiculous revenge.

But what about when these things happen in a polite way, among graduated people, people that lived with books but learned very little about loving mankind? Seems even worse, right? But it happens often enough... People that pretend to be friends for convenience, people that always have a nice smile when they say a bitter thing, people that always try to step on other people to achieve their goals, authoritarian rule disguised as smooth suggestion. I cannot tell you how many people (the ones with good relationships - which means friends of the bosses) I heard during my working life saying things like: "I will not rest until I destroy him (or her)". Would be nice if it had been only a nervous moment, but it wasn't. Often, after the "nervous moment", when they recover their charade of politeness, as if it was just coincidence they decide to say a simple and apparently innocent sentence about the "poor work" of the person that they just wanted to destroy. Imagine this innocent sentence day after day, spoken next to a friend (read boss).

And how many times has this happened to you? How many times have you decided to pretend you didn't understand? And how many times you did you look the other way because you knew that it would be worse to speak what you feel? How many times have you kept smiling? How many times, tired of pretending, have you started to be honest? What happened? Did you win something with it? How many times have you heard that, anyway, you are the one with the bad temper? Welcome to the dictatorship of silence. And this does not apply only to the ones that really struggle to survive. I believe it applies to all of us.

An example: How many times were you going to be the next boss of your department, but suddenly a guy that nobody knows where he came from took your place just because your general boss likes him more than he likes you? And how many times did you keep smiling because you clung to hope and because you believed that it would be worse to say what you really thought and felt?

So, after having to fight hard to have a job or to win the minimum wage you have to fight hard to be the boss's friend to keep the privilege of winning the minimum wage. And when you are lucky and competent enough to have a good job and a good salary, you still have to lick your boss's boots and approve any nonsense he says because your ideas are always worse than his... simply because he is the boss (which means you have to trust luck and hope to have a good, organized and competent boss).

Do I believe that this silent dictatorship happens everywhere? Yes. But do I also believe this happens more in countries like Portugal? Yes. Too many affections involved, too many sympathies and antipathies involved. Here I have the feeling that it's not always competence that matters.

Portugal is a country where it's so hard to conquer something, where it's so hard to keep what you conquered. It's a country where people cannot separate their personal tastes from competence or incompetence. Because Portugal is still a country not very professional and still growing in that matter, people become wild and do whatever they feel they must to keep what they have conquered. And this is the silent dictatorship we live every day of our lives, taking it everywhere we go.

And this country that demands from itself the same speed it sees in developed countries is still lost in the question of how to do things in a professional manner, because it is still lost in personal affections, lobbies and poor power games. Like a teenager, Portugal is somehow lost between what it was and what it wants to be, struggling to grow but meanwhile creating bad habits like fear and the resulting lack of initiative or creativity caused by fear.

Regards,

Proverb