Poverty, aging and “fears, real or imaginary”, are barriers that must be overcome, the President appeals. But “sin responding to a wall with another wall”.
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa calls for tolerance and evokes former President Jorge Sampaio to warn of the walls that threaten to divide the Portuguese.
In an opinion article published this Thursday in and entitled “Our walls or the memory of Jorge Sampaio”, the head of state recalls the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the year in which he and Jorge Sampaio ran for the Lisbon Chamber.
“I highlighted this decisive moment in contemporary History (…) And I converted the moment into a sign for the future, also for Portugal”, writes the President, recalling what Jorge Sampaio told him: “More important than the Berlin Wall are the walls that exist in our land”.
“Jorge Sampaio was right to evoke the walls created and worsened inside. And some of them have not stopped getting worse (…) Old walls fell. New walls have risen“.
What walls are these? Poverty, aging – “fewer young people remaining and more older generations entering dead ends”, but also “fears, real or imaginary, but all experienced as real”.
“Perhaps the best thing to do is, this Christmas, to review the list of the most urgent walls to overcome. Without responding to a wall with another wall. That walls tend to feed on other walls. And this does not create hope, it feeds closed condominiums of selfishness in which only some have the right to Christmas”, he warns.
