Seeing is believing

When life threatens to just drown us in all its huge waves of worries, troubles and tribulations, we sometimes need only to simply hold our breath, plunge in and let the waters wash over us, carry us some distance, till we resurface again to feel the radiant warmth of the beautiful sun. We look around, re-adjust our bearings and swim on from where we left off. Time is of no consequence because we will get to a place where we want to be eventually. But only if we wanted to be there in the first place.

Jose Saramago wrote about a place in his new book, Seeing. This place could have been anywhere in the world and its people anybody in the world. It was a place with a democratic government that seemed to have ruled it forever, a place with a people that seemed to have been content living under such a democratic government forever.

Something strange happened over not one day, but two days in two weeks. On the first election day, 70 per cent of the votes cast were blank. And on the second election day, held after the government declared the first election to be null and void, 83 per cent of the votes turned out blank.

Faced with such a frightening and unfamiliar scenario, the government first declared a state of emergency, indefinitely detained 500 voters selected through counter-espionage measures, put the city under a state of siege and finally produced its master stroke, withdrawing from the city and leaving it to its own devices, confident that chaos and disorder would erupt, and that the people would soon come before them, crawling on their knees and begging for forgiveness.

Life in the city, though, went on as it had done in the past, leading the government to turn increasingly ruthless in its measures to root out the source of this insurgence, and causing some in the cabinet to compare the plague of the blank votes to the plague of blindness that had struck the city four years ago.

A letter from someone in the city gave the government a lead and a breakthrough, the letter claiming that the current plague of blank votes was linked to the plague of blindness, and that both were caused by one person, a murderer. The subsequent infiltration of an investigation team into the city results in a devastating outcome.

Does such a place in Saramago's book exist today, a totalitarian government operating under the guise of democracy, backed by a subservient security and judicial structure, a government which has lost touch with its voters, a government which serves increasingly only its own interests, a government whose existence and purpose is eventually questioned, a compliant populace who were content with the status quo, an unquestioning people who never bothered about their rights, an unthinking people who atrophied into inaction and became mindless puppets, a disillusioned people who finally came to their senses.

Truth sometimes can be stranger than fiction.