Opinion articles

Human being. Lifetime. Beginning. Values. Abortion Rape. Weighing. Science. Religion. Culture. Modernity. Tradition. Agreements. Disagreements Violence. Right. Coexistence… These are some of the cultural categories that are related to the national debate on abortion. Each of them is in itself an object of permanent reflection that always occurs in the light of changing circumstances. The dialogue about those concepts never ends. Be open to people's argumentation. However, the debate –without being closed– reaches an institutional moment, the legal one, which is a normative category protected to be respected and abided by. Disagreement can be maintained and those who do not feel represented by the new institutionality can continue their fight so that their points of view are recognized. It is possible that the controversy is lived from the respect to the criteria of the others or also from the merciless attack to those who do not think alike. Among us, the social struggle is characterized by insult, violence and the disqualification of those who have different criteria.

Advancing at any price is for many an almost moral requirement and in certain cases a sample of the exercise of the best individual and group qualities. The positive consideration of this behavior is connected with personality characteristics such as decision, energy to overcome obstacles or discipline to go through processes and fully comply with them despite the inherent impediments to all action and purpose. Not giving up and moving forward are culturally inculcated attitudes and represent the human determination to build both what is positive and what is not.

It was the Bolsonaro government's response to the offer of the Group of Seven to allocate twenty million dollars to control fires in the Amazon. South Americans also directly exhorted the French president to take care of his own home, his colonies, and specifically French Guyana, bordering the Brazilian jungle. It is that the main industrialized economies, among which are the European Union, the United States, Canada, China, Japan and others - according to a report published by Greenpeace - are jointly responsible for a third of global deforestation because they are the largest markets consumption of meat, dairy products and biofuels that require large areas of land for their production. In addition, in these countries as in all, there are more and more roads and cities and consequently fewer forests.

In previous columns, I have addressed the issue of theories that explain the functioning of justice administration systems, with the intention of accurately describing their practical functioning without resorting to doctrines that justify them theoretically. It is legal realism. Is it possible to apply this approach to democracy? Yes. The traditional classification of forms of government proposes that there are three: monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, defining each of them with their specific elements that identify them and that are conceptually inherent to their operation. However, like any theoretical construction, in the case of forms of government, social activity is not always consistent with its definitions. It is then about intellectually valid claims to adapt reality to the proposed model, in this case, conceived for adequate social and political coexistence.

"Ecuadorian businessmen say that in the country a 'toll' of 23,7% is paid to obtain contracts." "Foreigners clashed with knives and stones in the streets of Baños." "Criminals enter and leave prisons." "In July alone, Greenland lost 197.000 million tons of ice due to high temperatures." "261.767 people lost their proper job in the last year, according to the INEC." "In the Carlos Andrade Marín Hospital they found USD 7 million in expired medicines." "Ecuadorian students fail 3 subjects." These are some current headlines that are published in the country: public and private corruption, social and prison violence, rapid deterioration of the environment, corruption in the health system and precarious levels in national education. However, the interest of a large part of the activists is not in these problems ... not even remotely! They do not address them because their priorities are different and consequently their vision of the world is. Also because they are not profitable at the media level. It is so tiresome to deal with the economic deterioration of the people, the pain of their precariousness or the uncertainty of the future of humanity. It is better and surely correct for them that their concerns are directed to ensuring that individual claims related to the satisfaction of impulses of the human condition, traditionally violated by restrictive cultural forms, are socially and legally accepted.

Recurrently, those who analyze contemporary global reality argue that it is a time in which the predictability of events is complex and that, in the best of cases, it could be projected into the next five or ten years. Some even think that these periods are too long because uncertainty is one of the constants of current reality. We cannot know what the world will be like in the future and if we sketch any forecast, in most cases it would be negative due to the serious damage caused by selfish behaviors that flourish in a scenario of accelerated destruction of the planet. We have lost, as humanity, control over our present and future on Earth.