TEÓDULO LÓPEZ MELÉNDEZ, Writer and Journalist - Caracas, Venezuela
The experienced educating Venezuelan (doctorates, conferences, carried out projects and others being carried out) she tells me between coffee and coffee: “Every time that she speaks I feel offended”. And adds: “My daughter felt very offended when she said that each Venezuelan should learn how to manage a he arms or to have one. She said that preferred not to see their children more before to see them with a arms.”
From that moment position with me the word offense and there am here that the only way to exorcize it is writing. Writer's condition takes me first to wonder on the origin of the word. Offense comes from the Greek eskándalo, he/she has to do with making to trip and to take to the victim to a trap. I tell myself that the biggest offense in the old world was Helena's kidnapping, wife of Menelao, on the part of Paris, with the consequence of the war of Troya. Here, and before our eyes, did they abduct to????? d?µ??? at?a that is not another that our Helena Democracy.
I leave to the field of the morals and of the ethics to determine that offense in a damage to the honor or the dignity. The offense can take the form of a jeer, of a scorn, of an insult. In the offense there is injustice and it demands repair. The offender is a debtor.
Do I tell myself that the Manichaeism takes to the sectarismo why the body social Venezuelan is not given for offended? Are the Venezuelans able to simply erase the reality of the continuous offense with a manotón? Is it that the horror has the stranger possibility of becoming partly of the day-to-dayness? Certainly that she can and we have seen it in all the totalitarian regímenes. That makes the Venezuelans that are not offended in front of the permanent diatribe it is to be integrated to a cultural deformation and to convert it in kind of a perverse divertimento. We see it in the permanent jeer that one makes of the offense, one that is a writhing of the spirit that achieves in the sardonic thing to avoid to be given for offended.
The writer that I am reminds Roberto's description Bolaños in A narrator in the intimacy where it is described as somebody that is always fighting although he knows that always, make that he makes, it will be defeated, but he faces his opponent. Offended, I add, for the simple reason that with my full friend of educational wisdom, me yes I react before the offense.
The lawyer that I am also realizes that, without intending it, to the holder “context of the offense”, it is using a juridical term. It is the absolute laxity of the institutional limits what allows the crime of the offense. I wonder about the pain to this crime, one that doesn't require of test. This objective offense, because it is in all the speeches, or in insult form or in jeer form, it cannot be taken to the tribunals of the ordinary justice and I don't want to fall in the grandiloquent expression of the “tribunal of the history.”
There is not another tribunal that that that we will define as the one of those that feel offended and they charge the insult by means of their incorporation to the own existential hierarchy and they think of a project of life without the maximum representative of the State offends. It is to belong to a territory where it is willing to give a fight to conquer to the offense and the offender not allowing that the offense is made part of the day-to-dayness until the grade of not perceiving it.
We live in the territory of the violence that the offender imposes and the Venezuelans seem not to realize that a medicine is required. Who are not offended they are accomplices. Not to see the offense becomes an exercise of the day by day. Then we can speak of a body social ajurídico, amoral, sick person.
In the plane of the ethics filosófíca-artificial-politics a pain is required for the trasgresión called offense that she goes about the social values and that according to the Natural Right it is need to preserve for the well-being of the men. As we are not in the field of the Penal Right it is necessary to go to the ethical thing, to the axiológico, and to conclude that the terror of the offense will finish when the Venezuelans are given for offended, when they change the normalized interference of the offense in their daily lives for the angry reaction the one attacked.
We are in an extralegal land, because the offender has violated all classification with saña. We are in the territory of the values that the Venezuelans should rescue. The pain that we should impose to the trasgresor is to impede him that it acts in the commission of its crime.
We leave the juridical considerations then to enter of full in the political considerations. The political condition to leave the state of violence is the determination of not allowing it more. When a social body decides not to authorize the insult, the clumsy and disheveled jeer, the offense, we arrive to the territory of the moral birdcall that is not another that the application of justice. That moral state is the platform from which the political alternatives are built in front of the régime offender.
The Venezuelans answer the offense with jeers in the intimacy of the protection represented by family and friends. The Venezuelans are shown people of well appealing to the right when right is not, when State of Right is not, and they fill this way, to the justice perforated by the power, of demands that invariably are solved in contrary. The Venezuelans cling, for cowardice or for convictions, to formal democratic procedures to avoid the untenable insult of “golpìstas, “oligarches”, squalid”. The Venezuelans look to the exterior in it offers of help ignoring the international politics's realities absolutely.
It happens that the Venezuelans have been forgetting, or, perhaps hiding in the pleats of the one recoils, the fundamental matter: all political resistance has a moral base, a base of defense of the own dignity and that you can summarize saying “I don't allow more the daily offenses of Chávez, the jeers of Chávez, the ethical crimes of Chávez”. When the Venezuelans decide to be given for offended, when they feel offended in front of the offender-aggressor, then the end of the nightmare will begin, because the translation of the moral resistance to actions concrete politicians will be as transparent and flowing as the water and it won't be necessary that this citizen in exercise of the political thing reminds them that they are being offended.
