Pre-Paid Punishments

My friend Jimena was probably 8 years old when Miss Rosita punished her for the first time. Jimena was to remain in the classroom after class writing 200 lines of the accusatory sentence: “I must not speak in class.” The school bus came and picked us up at four in the afternoon and we all went home except for Jimena. The next day I found Jimena filling more pages and she continued to do so for several recesses there after. Jimena was accumulating pages in order to have them ready for the next time she was punished. As a cautious and astute young girl, Jimena had prepared pages for all kinds of likely misbehavior:

-I must not speak in class.

-I must not leave my slips on the floor.

-I must not let the dog eat my homework.

-I will never throw up my lunch.

-I will not forget my books at the corner shop.

-I will not pull on Lupita’s pony tails.

-I will not wink at professor Cervantes.

Jimena was so busy writing pre-paid punishments that she no longer had time to misbehave. She was completely absorbed by the saving up of punishments.

To pre-pay for future misbehaviors has its advantages. To have a reserve of pre-paid punishments allows us to misbehave in abundance and not face immediate consequences. What’s more, pre-paid punishments make us righteous. Jimena grew so much in stature, since she no longer had time to misbehave and instead spent all her time filling pages and studying, that she became valedictorian of the high school class of ’62.

It occurs to me that life sometimes punishes us cruelly and we find ourselves without lines to turn in, in order to escape the punishment quickly. There are days where nothing goes right: there is a traffic jam, our husband leaves us, we get mugged at the supermarket without having found eggs to buy, we get infected with a bout of malaria that does not respond to compresses of merthiolate or sprinkles of holy water.

Is this the reason governments go from bad to worse? Is it that governments represent pre-paid punishments and that in the future we will be free of the tyranny of incompetence, waste and abuse? Are we pre-paying for the great leaders set to appear in the future, when honest, serious and dedicated students take on the task of governing with intelligence, respect, and skill?

Last Tuesday I ran into Jimena and I asked her if she still had any pre-paid punishments. She laughed and told me, serious and resigned: “I have a thousand pages that state that I will never vote for a candidate that promises to give me anything for free”. And why haven’t you used them Jimena, since we are all involved in this punishment? Jimena answered me: “Oh friend, I haven’t been able to use them because no one, not even Miss Rosita has asked me for them.” “By God Jimena, give me the pages and feel free to vote for whomever you think is serious and willing. Give me five hundred and go in peace.” I have papered the bathroom wall with Jimena’s pages so that I never forget that pre-paid punishments give flight to the imagination of the innocent and turn them into drawers sinners, who are the bravest and go the farthest in their restraint, because closet sinners come out of the closet from time to time and run for political office.

Evolutions and Revolutions

Nature is always in a state of evolution and adaptation, but once in a while this state suffers violent structural changes that produce dangerous discontinuities. These physical phenomenons: earthquakes, swells, killer storms, and human beings that are born with pig’s tails or devil’s horns are some examples of nature’s revolutions. Even though revolutions are very costly because of their violence, destruction, and the effect they have over insurance premiums and price fluctuations that worry so many people, revolutions are as unavoidable as volcano explosions. But some revolutions are not natural and these are the ones that can and should be avoided. Why worry and panic innocent children, when you can sing them lullabies to get them to sleep and assure they are productive at school the next day? This is the main responsibility of good and dignified parents. Why create problems in the economy and human relations if they are not going to lead to a more productive and coherent society?

What we’ve seen in countries such as Venezuela and others in which revolutionary governments appear from time to time like childhood pandemics, is that people get excited about the possibility of a “revolutionary” miracle, but end up left holding an empty bag.

Those wonderful “missions” that entered the Venezuelan ghettos and built our hopes up with the prospect of bringing basic medical services to those that most needed it, have mostly failed, except for that one we keep in a glass case for naive revolutionary buyers coming from abroad as revolutionary tourists. They tell me there are more than 1,800 Cuban medics that have fled their missionary jobs. And some of these opportunistic traitors are now trying their luck in Miami and Santo Domingo, where things work better than in the Venezuelan ghettos.

The sad thing is that we have destroyed, in our pursuit to become revolutionaries, what little capacity we had of providing decent medical services through the Ministry of Health. Because the revolution has truncated the evolution and functionality of our former institutions, we are no longer able to provide vaccinations or treatments for dysentery and dehydration in children, all basic medical practices which, if applied in time, can save lives. The old institutions might have been bad or at best mediocre, but they provided basic services. At least we weren’t being attacked by bubonic plagues and we had eradicated malaria and polio.

Nowadays we are vulnerable to any plague or epidemic known to man because we do not even have mercurochrome. The scarcity of medicines and Venezuelan medics is so great that medical treatment and prevention for both rich and poor has collapsed.

Give me evolutions and not revolutions. We’ll give the revolutions to the French, who have made a myth out of them, but have been content with the myth for 200 years. Once and never again! They now just sing to the tune of the Marseillaise, especially after the French Revolution killed more people than the medieval plagues. That revolution brought upon them the Napoleonic wars, which transformed a brave and capable soldier into an insufferable emperor, that ended up defeated and vanished to Saint Helena. It would have been better if Napoleon, the warrior, had limited himself to writing the Napoleonic Code. But no one is perfect. That is precisely why gradual evolutions are always better than arrogant, confusing, and destructive revolutions.