GOOD PEOPLE

My dears! I’m glad you came. 
It’s always nice having good people over.

Good things bring joy and happiness.
Good people like each other.
They behave well and properly;
They lead a healthy lifestyle, always doing the right thing and never being late!

Good people are white, and by that I mean transparent, truthful, you know?
A good villain, on the other hand, always looks great in black. I don’t mean to belittle your race; I mean, your species. But try to understand... there’s this whole thing about character darkness; this grim quality...

"Para hacer esta muralla,

Tráiganme todas las manos

Los negros, sus manos negras

Los blancos, sus blancas manos."

La Muralla, Nicolás Guillén Y Quilapayun

But never mind that, come on in!  
Val, get them some refreshments.
Val has been with us for years, she’s practically family!
It’s like she was born knowing everything that is off limits.
One of these days we were talking and I was complaining about people who let their dogs poop on the street, and she told me they didn’t have any sewage treatment where she lived. Would you look at that! We are the same; our pain brings us closer.

Try the foie gras spread, it’s delicious. We care a lot about the environment around here, and this brand has a sustainability seal and bla, bla, bla...

Good people care for nature. They live among it, while they work in the city. They look down on people who throw paper at homeless children. Good people save water for both the agro and business to be pop. Well, these people are also pop.   

Look who’s here! Come say hello to our guests.
He’s our youngest, and a ladies’ man ever since he was a little boy! And he’s a real stud, too! Just like his father.
Unlike our oldest daughter. All she wants is to study and do the right thing like a good wife!

Good people are a variation of family people. In this case, we should all be considered good people, because we all have a family, good or bad.
Family people never accept their gay children, alcoholic mothers or misogynist fathers! A good family lives in a cheap butter TV ad.

Well, I called you here to explain... it’s not that I don’t want a subway station here. I think it’s important, but it could be a little farther out away, closer to these different people. I don’t have anything against them; I’m not prejudiced. I even have some friends who are like that.

Good people know how to defend their turf, like when they try (and succeed) to change the location where a subway station is built in São Paulo. Or also when the Chilean city of Santiago decides to build affordable housing in an ecovillage at the base of the mountains.

But they’re not just defending their territory, but also their interests over other people’s territories, just like it was done with the entire caiçara population, including the indigenous people, and like it is still done today with the tenement residents in the Paquetá district, in the Santos harbor area. While in Santiago they try to prevent the housing project to be built, in Santos they want the locals to move across to the other side of town, where property prices are surely lower.

They aren’t really against building a subway station or an affordable housing project. In fact, they can even help these initiatives, as they helped protect the environment in Santiago, as long as these poor people don’t interfere with the tradition and good customs of their own private sunroom.

We are the good. We go to church. We donate to the poor. Soups for the homeless, fundraisers at the country club, culture and religion for indigenous people, refugees shown in the soap opera. I’m always giving away things to Val, like those toothbrush kits they give us during international flights. She loves those!

Good people don’t have to be good. The most important thing is believing you’re good, saying you’re good; the appearance that you are good. There’s no such thing as bad publicity.

They can’t see the contradiction sharing love to everyone on Sundays and then saying that all thieves should be killed the next day, while they watch their favorite public violence show on TV. Or when they worry about the children in Africa and don’t hesitate to pass judgment on kids lured in by drug traffic or a life in crime.

It’s obviously much easier to be good if you’re born into it. But make no mistake. That’s not the only face of good people. It’s not only the rich, the right-wingers or leftists. It’s not them. We are all good, because we believe in the virtues, ideas and feelings that we don’t follow in our own lives, but impose onto others.

How many times a day do we put on a mask, like actors and actresses?  All of this faking outside the stage is a search for righteous and socially accepted behaviors, without realizing that this actually fuels our own pet hypocrisy. No one is innocent.

 

“Hypocrites are those

who apply to others

the standards that they refuse

to accept for themselves.”

Noam Chomsky

 

Hypocrisy is one of the woes of injustice, harbingers of social inequality, wars and other human atrocities.

Oh, you’re leaving already? Have another cup of tea.

Women were once burnt at the stake by good people just for making tea. They were strangled for delivering babies, easing the pain of mothers and comforting newborn children. These good people also attended certain universities of horror, studying torturing techniques in Nazi camps.

The expression “good people” implies that there are two sides, and the “good” side is always right. The wall that divided Germany in half, the one that determines whether you’re a Mexican in your own country or in the neighboring country, or the one that decides if you live in a slum or a luxury apartment. It doesn’t matter if it stretches out as far as the Great Wall of China or if you can grow a vertical garden on it. This social separation that we see in the world is in each and every one of us.

Let’s be honest. Let’s have empathy.

“Let the gay be gay, let the fat people eat, let the girls have sex, let me make my babies, LET PEOPLE BE”

Mc Catra

Claudio Eduardo, Sesc Online Editor

*Text inspired by Preto plays of Cia. Brasileira de Teatro (Brazil), Amazónia, Mala Voadora group (Portugal), Cuando Estallan las Paredes, Teatro Petra (Colombia), and Nimby (Nosotros Somos los Buenos), Colectivo Zoológico and Theater und Orchester Heidelberg (Chile).