Day of Courage
"My brother was born on January 11, 1945. Thank God we had heroes like Stuart," says Hildegard Angel.
By Hildegard Angel, for 247
On January 11th, 1945, my brother was born. We were almost five years apart. With our parents' separation, he became the man of the house. My sister told me, and I didn't remember, that our parents gathered us together to announce the separation. I must have been 9 or 10 years old and, according to Ana Cristina, I started bawling, cried, cried loudly, cried a lot, turned completely red. Ana Cristina was the fragile, quiet one. And my brother stretched his arms over both of us, protective. And so we stood, the three of us, listening to the sentence that would determine our lives. Stuart was the voice of balance, of common sense, of kindness. We respected and loved him very much. He was into reading, and so were we. But he turned towards civic and political awareness. At university, while studying economics, he embraced the cause of his generation: to reclaim the country that had been taken from us by force, restoring democracy, freedom of expression, thought, reading, and choice. All of this had been taken from us by the military dictatorship. They wanted us to be meek and obedient sheep, and that's what they made of us, imposing fear, terror, persecution, and death. The worst deaths. Most submitted, docile. But thank God we had heroes, like Stuart, like my mother, and so many others, so that today we can remember them as examples and references. To remember that courage is needed to be a free and happy people.
May every day be a Day of Courage, in the name of the happiness of the Brazilian people...
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* This is an opinion article, the responsibility of the author, and does not reflect the opinion of Brasil 247.