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When I was a child I loved the magical world of circuses, and what I liked most about circuses were animals. I was excited to be able to see up close each of those animals that traveled by caravan from city to city. During the performance, everything seemed wonderful and dazzling to me, but the appearance of the elephant was always my favorite moment.
The enormous beast displayed impressive skill, size, and strength. It was obvious that such an animal would be able to uproot a tree with a single jerk. And yet, to my surprise, after each performance, the circus staff chained the elephant to a small stake just driven into the ground.
The stake was just a tiny piece of wood barely buried a few inches into the ground. And although the chain was thick and powerful, It seemed obvious to me that an animal capable of uprooting a tree by its force could easily free itself from the stake and flee.
What was holding the elephant?
Why didn’t he run away?
When I was five or six years old, I still trusted the wisdom of the grown-ups. So I asked my teachers, my uncle and my mother about the mystery of the elephant. They explained to me that the elephant did not escape because it was trained. I then asked the obvious question: “If he’s trained, why do they chain him?”
Nobody could answer this second question.
A long time later, I met someone very wise, who helped me find the answer. The circus elephant has been chained to a stake since he was very, very young. I remember closing my eyes and imagining little defenseless newborn elephant tied to stake.
I pictured him pushing and pulling the chain, day after day, trying to get loose. She could almost see him, falling asleep each night exhausted from the effort, thinking of trying again the next morning. But it was all useless: the stake was too strong for a newborn animal, even an elephant.
Until, one day, the saddest day of his short life, the animal accepted helplessly that it could not free itself and resigned itself to its fate.
I understood then why the huge and powerful elephant that I saw in the circus was left chained. He was convinced that he could never free himself from his stake. He does not escape because he thinks he cannot. In his elephant memory, he is engraved with the memory of the helplessness he felt shortly after he was born, and has never again tested his strength.
Some nights I dream that I go up to the chained elephant and say in his ear: “You know? You think you can’t do some things just because once, a long time ago, you tried and failed. You must realize that time has passed and today you are bigger and stronger than before. If you really wanted to break free, I’m sure you could. Why do not you try it?”.
Sometimes I wake up thinking that my elephant one day finally tried and managed to pull out the stake. Then I smile and I imagine that the huge animal may continue to travel with the circus, because it likes to entertain children very much.
But he is no longer chained.
(…)
I was thinking of writing a column about the social changes of the last decades in Chile. About Chileans born together with democracy, children of those who kicked stones in the marginality of the eighties. They who were schoolchildren during the 2006 penguin revolt, who were first-generation university students in the 2011 protest, and who are first-generation young professionals, in debt and disenchanted in the 2019 outbreak.
I intended to quote the sociologist Manuel Canales, who had long ago revealed “the emergence of a new movement or social actor, which presses no longer on the basis of necessity but of social law.
Remember how the researcher Kathya Araujo describes a generation “of individuals with a strengthened image of themselves, and with increased confidence in their own capacities and agency ”, and as they no longer tolerate“ a rigid society, of a top-down, authoritarian and elitist character, where some claim a kind of natural hierarchy with respect to others, and where a logic of privileges “
To conclude how Canales himself declares that “they were mistaken in believing that an old people followed, conformed, hard, to their social inferiority as a real and natural matter (…) This new, professional people no longer believe that. He neither wears a yoke nor does he feel less ”.
But for what. If on this historic day the parable of the elephant says it all, and even better.
