Cartoon of Colombian journalist Omar Rincón. Source: Revista 070
Democracy is no longer sexy or entertaining. Citizens are too caught up in WhatsApp wars. Public life is boring, but private life is entertaining. Politicians reek and they don’t even know it yet. This is how we’ve arrived at the world of Celebrity politics and cynical democracy. Culture has mutated, our world of today is another world. Urgent: politics and democracy must be reinvented. Here you’ll find a fragmented and Manichean map to help understand our political times. Reflections to be inserted by the reader.
On the 11th of April, I awoke with a mescal hangover turned political nightmare when I read in El Tiempo that “73% of Colombian students approve of a dictatorship” because “in terms of order and security, democracy is not enough”. The International Study of Civic and Citizen Education (ICCS) reveals “a worrying level of antidemocratic values and antisocial tendencies among the majority of young people surveyed” they claim.
