Brazilians Are Taking to the Streets to Protest Their Country's Injustice and Inequality—Why Aren't

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/activism/brazilians-are-taking-streets-protest-their-countrys-injustice-and-inequality-why-arent-we

Brazilians Are Taking to the Streets to Protest Their Country's Injustice and Inequality—Why Aren't We?


For nearly two weeks, more than a million citizens across Brazil have taken to the streets to protest political corruption, economic injustice, poor health care, inadequate schools, lousy mass transit, a crumbling infrastructure and — yes, in the land of Pelé — billions blown on sports.

“Brazil, wake up, any good teacher is worth more than Neymar!” That’s what the crowds have been shouting. Neymar da Silva Santos, Jr. is the 21-year-old Brazilian star who’s getting nearly $90 million to play for Futbol Club Barcelona. “When your son is ill, take him to the stadium,” read one protester’s sign, razzing the $13.3 billion Brazil is spending to host the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the $18 billion it will cost the country to host the 2016 Summer Olympics. Even this soccer-mad nation is saying there’s something out of whack with public priorities, and it’s time to set things right.

The massive demonstrations have stunned Brazilians themselves, for their size, their spontaneity and their civic fury. “If you’re not outraged,” an American bumper sticker goes, “you’re not paying attention.” Brazilians are paying attention to their problems, and they’re mad as hell. So why aren’t we?

The Brazilian protests were sparked by a bus fare increase in São Paulo. It’s grimly comical to see American news media explain why a 9-cent hike is such a big deal by resorting to the usual trope for covering social unrest in the developing world, like when the price of wheat goes up a few pennies. To help us understand why this matters so much, our press relates the cost of bread or buses to the minimum wage in distant lands and points out the dependency of their diets on staples and of their jobs on public transportation. Even though millions of Americans below the poverty line can’t make a living wage, and millions more are barely hanging on by their fingernails, the infotainment narrative of life in America is so divorced from the pervasive reality of struggling to survive that journalists assume we’d be bewildered that bus fares could start such a fire.

[raccoon]

1. I have often wondered that. IME (I live in a red state) a lot of dumbasses think of protestors as

if they were disobedient children. The dumbass authoritarian mindset/ "strict father mentality." (Lakoff)

[Dreamer Tatum]

2. and that, folks, is why the streets are empty

People worry about how they look to other people.

Oh, also we have the internet, which allows one to replace action with words. Also "kittehs". I don't think I ever saw references to "kittehs" in my studies of American protests of the Sixties.

Say, what happened on Game of Thrones last night?

[JCMach1]

3. American mindset is that 'our' revolution took place in 1776

Didn't y'all learn nuthin' from schoolin'

[treestar]

4. Because conditions in Brazil are nothing like conditions here?

[Neoma]

5. Because we know the media will do everything they can to slander or cover up our protests?

[Fire Walk With Me]

6. K&R!

[hack89]

7. Because the situation in Brazil is worse than America by orders of magnitude?

poverty, education, crime, housing - you name it.