THE RIGHT TO DELIRIUM 

EDUARDO GALEANO

 

From the Spanish original, “El derecho al delirio”, in the journal Archipielago: Revista Cultural de Nuestra America. No. 22/23, March-June 1999. Informal English translation by Norman Girvan.  
 

The new millennium is upon us! We shouldn’t take it too seriously: after all, the year 2001 of the Christians is the year 1379 of the Muslims, 5114 of the Mayas and 5762 of the Jews. The new millennium starts on January 1^st thanks to the caprice of the senators of Imperial Rome who decided one fine day to break with the tradition of celebrating the New Year at the beginning of spring. And the annual count of the Christian era derives from another caprice: one fine day, the Pope of Rome decided to fix the date of the birth of Christ, although nobody really knew when He was born.

An invitation to flight

 

Millennium comes and millennium goes, but the occasion is an opportunity for the worshippers of that terrifying word to pontificate on the destiny of humanity, and for the spokespersons of the wrath of God to announce the end of the world and generalised destruction, while everything continues as before, the rest of us must shut up and continue our long march through the mystery of eternity.  

And yet, arbitrary though the date might be, few of us can resist the temptation of wondering what the world of the future will be like. And somebody will be there to know it. We can be certain of one thing: in the 21^st century, if we are still here, we will all be people from the past century and worse still, from the past millennium! 

Although we cannot foretell the future, at least we have the right to imagine what we would like it to be. In 1948 and in 1976, the United Nations proclaimed an extensive list of human rights. But the vast majority of humanity has no other rights other than to see, to hear and to keep quiet. What if we were to exercise the as yet undeclared right to dream? What if we were to fantasise, even for a moment? Let’s project our vision beyond the current world of infamy and imagine another possible world: a world  

Where the air will be clean of every poison that doesn’t come from human fears and human passions; 

Where in the streets, the automobiles will be run over by the dogs; 

Where people will not be driven by the automobile, or programmed by the computer, or watched by the television; 

Where the TV will no longer be the most important member of the family, but will be treated like the clothes iron or the washing machine; 

Where people will work to live and will not live to work; 

Where there will be  a  law that makes it a crime to be stupid, which is defined as living for the sake of possession or of gain, instead of living for the celebration of life itself, like the bird that sings without knowing what is sings and the child who plays without knowing what game it is playing; 

Where no country will make prisoners of young men who refuse military service, only of those who wish to undertake it; 

Where economists will not call the level of consumption “the standard of living”, nor will they confuse the quantity of things with the quality of life;  

Where cooks will not believe that lobsters just love to be boiled alive; 

And historians will not believe that countries just love to be invaded; 

And politicians will not believe that poor people just love to live on promises; 

Where solemnity will not be a virtue and nobody will take seriously those who cannot jest; 

Where death and money will have lost their magical powers, so that thieves and oppressors do not magically become gentlemen of virtue merely because they have died and left a great deal of money; 

Where no one will be thought to be a hero, or a fool, for doing what she thinks is right instead of what is convenient;  

Where the world will not be at war with the poor, but against poverty, and to ensure victory the military industrial complex will need only to abolish itself; 

Where food will not be a commodity, or communication a business, because food and communication will be human rights; 

Where nobody will die of hunger, because nobody will die of indigestion;  

Where street children will not treated like garbage, because there will be no street children; 

Where rich children will not be treated like money, because there will no rich children; 

Where education will not be a privilege of those who can pay for it; 

Nor will the police be the curse of those who cannot buy them; 

Where justice and liberty, Siamese twins now condemned to live apart, will once more be joined together, cemented, shoulder to shoulder; 

Where a woman, black, will be President of Brazil, and another woman, black, will be President of the United States; where an Indian woman will rule Guatemala and another, Peru; 

And in Argentina, the “mad women” of the Plaza de Mayo will be seen as exemplars of sanity, because they refused to forget in a time of compulsory amnesia; 

Where the Holy Mother Church will correct the printing errors in the Tablet of Moses, and the Sixth Commandment will be an injunction to celebrate the body; 

Where the Church has also added another commandment, which God forgot: “Love thee Nature, of which thou formest a part”; 

Where the deserts of the world are reforested, as are the deserts of the soul; 

Where those who despair have hope, and those who are lost are found, for they who despair are those who hope for much and they who are lost are those who seek for much; 

Where we are the compatriots and contemporaries of all who want justice and beauty in the world; no matter where they were born and when they lived, without the slightest regard for the boundaries of time and space; 

Where perfection will continue to be the absurd privilege of the gods, but in this untidy and messed-up world, every night is lived as if it is the last and every day as if it is the first. 

Note: This essay by Eduardo Galeano was used in a Tribute to Professor George Beckford delivered at the Conference of Caribbean Economists held in Martinique, November 1999.