The impressive popular mobilization that generated the World Cup triumph had the smell of the Homeland, Argentines and Argentines feel part of a common whole, united and represented by the most current national symbol, the national team’s shirt. And with a collective leadership that emerged from the bottom up, in favor of the recognition of virtues and characteristics that we feel urgently necessary beyond the limits of football: effort, humility, the ability to transform defeats into milestones on the road to victory, courage , group work, conviction of doing well the task that corresponds to each one.
The outcropping these days of a moving patriotic feeling occurs despite what is dictated by our founding DNA: the victors of our civil wars, after Caseros and Pavón, the Buenos Aires oligarchy, imagined an Argentina whose only destiny, like a curse of its fertile pampas, was the supplier of food for Europe, an appendage of the power of that time, Great Britain, and they hallucinated the project of inventing a Europe on this side of the ocean.
For this it was necessary to erase from the map, or try to, everything that smacked of national, Creole, gauchesco, native people, Hispanic. To “barbarism” according to the inclement sentence from Sarmiento, spokesman for “civilization” imposed by blood and fire. “The idea was not to develop America according to America, incorporating the elements of modern civilization; enriching one’s own culture with the assimilated external contribution, like who pays the land where the tree grows. An attempt was made to create Europe in America, transplanting the tree and destroying the Creole or indigenous that could be an obstacle to its growth according to Europe, and not according to America” (Arturo Jauretche)
This cultural colonization, essential for other forms of domination, the economic one for example, set out, and unfortunately succeeded in excess, to dilute the national commitment, the idea of Homeland, the conviction of throwing Argentines and Argentines to the same side, the awareness of sharing a history and a future with compatriots, etymologically “sons of the same father”, that is, brothers.
The weakening of national sentiment is what allows some to commit unpayable debts or manage it with inefficiency and corruption regardless of the damage caused to what they should love, knowing that cultural colonization guarantees them not only impunity but also the prize, protected by the anesthetized patriotic reflexes of our society.
It is to be celebrated that a sporting victory has shown that the patriotic gland of our people is still alive, despite the subtle political, educational, media, and consumerist mechanisms to nullify it.
by Pacho O’Donnell
