I do not like to decide whether I “approve” or “reject” the New Constitution by listening to threats of crisis and outbursts from today’s totalitarians. To deny that democratic right rebels my personal history. I look at my sketch of this Hong Kong that suffered 500 years of threats and violence from its rulers, from Portuguese, British, Japanese, opium dealers and today from the One Party.
From my trip, I witness the present by drawing the skyscraper of the Bank of China designed by Ming Pei (the same of the Louvre pyramid) next to boats with shapes evoking the ancient China, the British heritage, the millenary trade and a free market economy controlled by the Chinese Communist Party that says “one country two systems” (?).
What political barbarism we live in our Chile when dictators and dictator-grudges rise up to disqualify the possibility of voting freely whether we will approve or not the NC? Anti-democratic sectarianism forgets that 80% of the electorate has enshrined both options as legitimate. I fought for a New Constitution defending my right to public debate to add, to the good environmental proposals, incentives to produce wealth with our nature, together with taking care of it; to have a strong Judiciary as we longed for when we were imprisoned by the Dictatorship and not a weakened “system”; to reform the Legislative Branch without joining childish demonisations that propose a decayed, confused and castrated entity. I demand to feel an active part of Democracy.
I do not accept that, when we meet with political leaders, we are accused of being anti-democratic for publicly participating in the debate that we were promised would be socially broad. “We are going to surround the Convention” said those who today consider that meeting with constituents and giving them an opinion is anti-democratic. They are like those who, in the Hong Kong of my sketch, decide what we can talk about and woe betide anyone who says what they don’t like.
I rebel.
