Get me out of the wolf's world.
In India, almost 100 years ago, two children, Amala and Kamala, were discovered who had lived in a wolf family. The first died at the age of one and a half after coming into contact with civilization. The other lived for nine years.
With each passing day, the feeling grows that living in a cave is the best option. Is it really? Society is so deranged that we've lost a bit of our way in terms of human understanding. The Realengo incident, reported in the press, left everyone – without exception – astonished, perplexed, speechless, dumbfounded. We lack, obviously, the capacity to reason in order to find an explanation, if it's even possible to explain it.
Most of us consider ourselves modern. We have all the technological devices at our disposal and we make increasingly virtual contacts. Eye contact is replaced, at best, by camera-to-camera interaction. The world I live in is not the same as yours; our differences may lie in how much your daily life is more or less virtual than mine.
We Brazilians have already witnessed murders in movie theaters, banks, supermarkets, prisons, newsstands, hospitals, schools, on Paulista Avenue, and even in our own homes; in short, murders everywhere. Why are we still perplexed?
Are we more or less dismayed to learn who the victims were—defenseless or armed, gay or straight, indigenous, black, white, children or adults? Homicide will exist as long as society exists. There's no point in hiding from the fact; the problem must be faced head-on: the world is moving too fast.
It's as if we're all running towards somewhere and, along the way, forgetting to help those on the sidelines. Imagine a wide avenue and people speeding by, looking at others who can't keep up, standing still, encapsulated in their thoughts, their hardships, their pain, and their fears. These thoughts are often fueled by violent video games, slogans, and subversive attitudes on a free computer network (the internet). Furthermore, there's the coexistence with the arrogance of those who achieve their social goals, who knows at the cost of unethical behavior, such as pseudo-success at work or school. This evident distance from obtaining everything we desire sometimes leads us to resort to our most primitive instincts.
In India, almost 100 years ago, two children, Amala and Kamala, were discovered who had lived in a wolf family. The first died at the age of one and a half after coming into contact with civilization. The other lived for nine years. Her behavior was a result of her learning and living with animals. A reclusive being who even walked on all fours and displayed traits of violence. She developed some of her human intelligence, although she fed on raw and rotten meat. The resources available at the time were not enough to allow her to survive. She was an animal-person, the result of a tragic event, and became a legend.
Nowadays, resources are different, and yet we wonder how many animal-people we still have out there, perhaps the result of our own, and no less animalistic, technological rush?
Jacques Miranda is a university professor.