On a more personal note…
The announcement begins at least a week before the actual event takes place. During that time people all across the country rearrange their work, school, life commitments in order to attend. The silent tension that we live with on a daily basis, that collects on our backs or at the pit of our stomach, becomes a palpable buzz, a nervous excitement much like the rising bubbles of a couple of alka-seltzers in a glass of water. From the moment the event is made public, people begin to determine the logistics: who to march with? Where to meet? At what time? How to return home?
I like to march with my family or my boyfriend’s family, not friends. I also like to go in the middle of the event, to take the place of the people who started early. I don’t usually stay for the speeches, but walk home and watch them of the television, where I can actually understand what the speakers say. Marches are exhausting. Walking among a river of high strung, nervous Venezuelans is both draining and stimulating. Everywhere you turn someone is yelling a slogan, singing, dancing, carrying a poster or wearing an interesting shirt. You exchange tidbits of information with people you know along the way and always keep an eye out for any type of disturbance that can escalate to a running stampede or a confrontation with the National Guard. More than once I have found myself running away from advancing vehicles packed with guards that are shooting into the angry crowd. One very real lesson I have learned from attending these marches is that a second can change my life and affect (negatively) the people who care about me, thus I stay on the fringes of the conflict although I always go. After these events one frequently hears of people who where shot, injured, beaten, or captured by the National Guard and how, after that, their life is never the same.
Sometimes marching can be misleading. Seeing
rivers of a hundred thousand people can make you confidant about the outcome of an election, so confidant many people who take the time to march fail to stand in line to vote. I think this is where our problem as Venezuelan’s lies and even the reason why we have lost so many elections in the past. We invest our energy in the wrong thing, in expressing our point of view so that our peers can see our devotion, yet we fail to follow through, to express this same opinion in the privacy of an election ballot. Until we learn to save our energy for the right thing, to defend our rights the right way (through suffrage), we might continue to be stuck with what we do not like.
