Venezuela – why does the self-destruction continue or the Ant and the Grasshopper

My girlfriend Gloria, a vivacious Venezuelan, her mother is Colombian her father a Spaniard, reminded me of the Ant and the Grasshopper this week, as we were having lovely lunch at the Amsterdam Manor, under the tree, beach side, at the middy version of Passions on the Beach.

True to her party-girl definition she had a beer. I had water. Someone needs to go back to work.

The Ant and the Grasshopper or alternatively titled The Grasshopper and the Ant, is one of Aesop’s Fables. The fable describes a hungry grasshopper when winter comes, because he danced all summer, and did not plan for the future, living for the moment, while the ant worked hard, amassed supplies and reaped the reward in tough times.

The way we see it now, the grasshopper was a fun, artistic, hedonistic, charismatic creature while the ant a boring, depressing, no fun, calculated meanie.

Left brain. Right brain. Creative and artistic Vs structured and logical.

Gloria explained to me that Venezuelans are fun loving creatures, they want to dance and drink and romance every day, all day, they want it easy, uncomplicated, unlike their more cerebral, logical Colombia neighbors.

Falling in the trap of the socialist ideology, they had it easy for a long time, rich, fat & happy. And over the past 20 something years the ideology infested everyone’s thinking and became more important than people.

So here we are: With the ideology, the doctrine, above all, the individual has to sacrifice all. Not for nothing, they sing Venezuela or death. My way, or the highway.

It’s like the classic question in times of crisis: Do you want to be happy, or right? You choose?!

Most people in Venezuela Gloria says, want be right, they want to demonstrate the doctrine was useful, and superior and would do anything to prove to the world they are right, that Chavismo is the answer that the mongrel of socialism, left-wing populism and patriotism is the key to success as a nation.

And that’s what I learned from Gloria.

Then one of my other friends added that luckily there are disorganized, with bullets stored in Caracas and rifles in Maracaibo, otherwise we’d had a blood bath.

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March 24, 2018
Rona Coster