The turning tide?

The view from my window, right now, 8.40, Thursday, 2014.

~~~

The Brazil match (fiasco) which was more than a football match and less than one at the same time. The horror-yes, that's the only word-on the faces of the supporters. Someone commented about how though they didn't even like football they were riveted to this spectacle because it was if in a few minutes someone's whole destiny could be mapped out. As the newspapers later said: 'some of the players will be scarred for life'. The idea that everything can fall apart in six minutes and that no matter what else happens in your life later on you'll always be remembered for that fatal night and your part in it.

You blanked out. I think that was the instinctive defensive reaction. As if to say: I wasn't really there and had nothing to do with it...it was like fate hurtling towards you and all you could do was close your eyes. Far better to think that than imagine you were, somehow, a part of the whole, terrible scheme, that you were part of the story.

Right said Fred: it will take a higher power to help us forget/move on. Does the manner of defeat have something to do with the evangelical spirit of Luiz and others? The belief that God is on your side and that grace will get you through, no matter what. The tide will turn, the sky will clear and you'll find your own pace again, your place in history; the old times will return, the old style regained, as familiar as an old note played on the piano that is the old west, that is late music hall legend and that is suddenly remembered. 

But the realization that there's nothing to play for now. Go through the motions and kill time or sit in the long grass or under a tree's shade and observe the tired mothers in the park...

~~~

But the need to break with 30 years of cash-backed dogma against public ownership goes well beyond rail. The privatised industries haven't only failed to deliver efficiency, value for money, accountability or secure jobs. They have also sucked wealth, rentier-style, out of sitting-duck monopolies, concentrated economic decision-making in fewer and fewer hands, deepened inequality and failed to deliver the investment essential to sustainable growth.

---S. Milne, The Guardian.