Anyway, Things Change…

Erasmo Calzadilla

In a few of my diary entries a while back, I gave some examples of how this country is changing.  I noted that this could be seen by the fact that even though I openly stated my dissatisfaction with “the system,” I remained under contract as a professor of a subject of ideological significance: the History of the Philosophy, which is what I taught at a community-based university.

However, a few days before starting the course, and after spending part of my vacation editing a complementary text for use by my future students, the school contacted me to say “they would be doing without my services.”

The reason, they said, was my failure to attend presentations on methodological preparation.  But that wasn’t true; in fact, I was one of the few people who attended those boring lectures.

I didn’t argue; I merely collected my things together and prepared myself for the adventure of finding where I could earn a few pesos a day to make up for the loss.  I walked and walked through the sunny city, and I was just at the point of wearing out my soles when I finally stumbled on a workplace that welcomed me.  I’ll talk about it in my next entry.

My having been laid off depressed me, but in a way came at a good time.  I was starting to get burned out teaching philosophy the way it’s done here.  After the initial rush of teaching the grandmother of sciences in a university, I wasn’t left with too much more.

Nevertheless, what happened reaffirms one thing: things change, especially in the imaginations of people, which decreasingly revolve around the State and its leaders.

The ideo-bureaucrats continue to hold the strategic positions, and with all they have they’re trying to stop or brake the advent of a new model, but even that’s a part of change.