I often do an exercise that helps me understand the true weight of the gray hair that already paints my hair: I do math; I add up those years that elapsed between the events that constituted the very object of my history books and the beginning of my high school, and I analyze what has happened in the same period, counted backwards, from today backwards, according to the same number of years added. For example: thirty-five years passed between the end of World War II and the start of high school. That same period, counted backwards from today, places us at the fall of the Berlin Wall.
This hobby allows me to assimilate the concept of modernity in which my father lives at almost ninety years old, and it also allows me to understand how distant, in time, my children perceive the music or the events that I myself experienced when I was young.
If, historically and conceptually, the arrival of Lázaro Cárdenas to power, the date on which my father was born, seems very distant to me, that means that the massacre in the plaza of the three cultures in Tlatelolco, which had place on the date I was born. If the administration of Miguel Alemán Valdés seems distant to me, then the administration of Luis Echeverría Álvarez is equally distant to my children.
The ability to be empathetic with the vision of history and the understanding of the world that the generation of all young people who were born after the year 2000 has, is a very relevant exercise at this time, because they are the ones on whom the destiny of the world really rests. country, by forming the conglomerate of undecided voters who will tip the balance on June 2.
This administration has enjoyed good luck, but it has also enjoyed the benefit of having and being able to freely and discretionally dispose of savings consolidated over almost thirty years. An entire ‘neoliberal’ period in which those who were entrusted with the government of the country decided to venture into professional practices of public finance management with the sole objective of ending, once and for all, the six-year crises.
This year will pass without major setbacks; However, how long will we be able to endure the same fate? Will inflation ever be controlled? Will the landing of exchange rate parity be gradual?
It would be difficult for my children to understand what a devaluation is if they have not experienced it. Furthermore, they will be unable to appreciate what a democracy is if they have not experienced what it means to live in a party dictatorship. If they are barely embedded in the labor market, they are really unable to know what the negative effect of inflation is on the purchasing power of wages.
My children know about the existence of devaluations because they are described in their history books, in the same way that I studied the Great Depression of ’29. Their assessment of the damage and impact that an economic crisis causes on people’s lives is dogmatic, because neither they, nor any of their friends and generation companions, have experienced it.
It seems that the generation of new voters could be destined to learn history the hard way: by repeating their mistakes.
Those of us who have known the harsh reality of fictional democracy; of the irresponsibility of public finance management; of rampant corruption; of the annihilating partisan institutionality, we have the inalienable obligation to transmit to the new generations, to the youngest voters with whom we have contact, our experience and our judgment regarding two essential elements, which will be disputed next month: what has won Mexico during this century in the field of freedom and democracy; and, what does economic stability associated with the disciplined exercise of public administration mean.
The future of Mexico rests in the hands of young people who have become accustomed to receiving news in one hundred and forty characters; young people who, in a good number, find their satisfaction and happiness in the false and ephemeral world that the screen of their phone shows them in the palm of their hand, and who will hardly undertake a search for reason and knowledge through documented research .
With the power of the oral influence that the adult generations come to have in relation to the closest young people, it is time to advance on the most urgent path of family dialogue and civic education.
In the idle exercise of counting the years, which I do every third day, today I realized that time is short, and the two weeks that have passed will end up being insufficient in the future to sow the degree of consciousness that young people Voters must win, to fulfill responsibly, with maturity and seriousness, the great challenge that history has placed before them.
