Survivor's guilt

Many of the one billion followers this blog surely has (I don't trust these biased stats that say I don't even have ten people reading this, all they want is to make me write more and give them clicks!) know that my favorite rapper is Kendrick Lamar. In fact, if you know me in person and/or follow me on Twitter, I am pretty sure you are part of one of these three groups:

• You know I saw Kendrick live in Lisbon back in 2016.
• You know I saw Kendrick live in Lisbon back in 2016 and that I had (and still have) a ticket to see him again this past summer, but then covid happened, and WHERE THE FUCK IS THE NEW ALBUM?!
• You know I saw Kendrick live in Lisbon back in 2016 and that I had (and still have) a ticket to see him again this past summer, but then covid happened, and WHERE THE FUCK IS THE NEW ALBUM, and you know I firmly disagreed with him when, two years ago, he called a fan on stage to sing with him, she was white and sang "nigga" when she was supposed to, but the crowd booed her and he took her side.

Anyway, Kendrick. I got hooked on him with To Pimp a Butterfly (2PAB), a masterpiece about which I could write a full blog post - especially after listening to Dissect, a podcast dissecting every song of it, please check it out too. It was only after it that I got to know his previous music and, in particular, songs from his first album/last mixtape, Section.80 (Good Kid, M.A.A.D City is, however, his major-label debut) such as ADHD and HiiiPoWeR.

This post is not about rap, so I won't go into much detail about the song. My whole point in bringing it up is to mention that Kendrick refers to several black activists in the song, such as Fred Hampton and Bobby Seale (both Black Panthers), who are portrayed in the recent Netflix movie "The Trial of the Chicago 7". It's a movie that tells the story of seven white activists, not that their skin tone is relevant but just to indicate they were not necessarily focused only on the African-American cause - although Seale appears as the eighth, having a mistrial after being, literally, bound and gagged in a US district court, and Hampton as Seale's unofficial advisor in court. And this is why I remembered HiiiPoWeR while watching the movie, and while we have to go back to Kung Fu Kenny one last time to understand the title of this post.

Survivor's guilt is something Kendrick talks about in several songs, directly or indirectly (for example, in the poem guiding the story of 2PAB) and interviews. It's the feeling he has because he was able to leave Compton and resist the temptations the street life offered him - selling drugs for quick cash, spending every day drunk and high, grabbing a gun to kill a rival gang member, and continuing the vicious cycle of government-promoted poverty and incarceration. Because he did it, and others, many others didn't (Kendrick recalls he saw his first murder at the age of five, and even in recent years he talks about some friends having been killed), he feels guilty for it. He feels guilty for having survived, for living the life he lives nowadays while many of his friends didn't even make it past 25.

Of course, I'm not trying to say my situation is comparable to Kendrick, at all. But I think that it is precisely by being aware of it that I feel something similar to what he describes. As a Portuguese, I'm born in the third safest country on the planet, not at all the richest but still richer than 90% of the others, a piece of land that nobody except the Castilians/Spaniards ever tried to conquer (except the French in the 1800s but well, it was Napoleon and we kicked his ass), virtually absent from both World Wars. And while my family is not rich, it's clearly still above the average, which gave me the means - not at all my merit, just pure luck - to have educated parents that made me educated as well, and wealthy enough to, even with many sacrifices from their side, allow me to relocate to study and even to fund my first month after moving to the Netherlands. What I am trying to say is: I literally have no problems in my life. Sure, sometimes I am heartbroken, some other times I missed a flight, maybe I even had to get stitched this summer after hitting my head in an aluminum window. But why did that happened? Because daddy and mommy funded my Erasmus in Brussels, which allowed me to catch a flight to Hamburg and meet my ex, so as to "compensate" having lost the one to Dublin some weeks before. And because I went to Porto Santo this summer, the second and most paradisiac island of Madeira, the Portuguese islands that everybody in the world wants to visit. So, as you can see, not even these are real problems, but just minor, unfortunate circumstances of very lucky situations that have been falling on my lap throughout these 26 years. Sure, they suck, and of course that others having worse problems doesn't mean you don't have them either, but I really am fucking privileged.

I am even entitled to be socialist. Just imagine, a Portuguese engineering graduate, studying at the most elitist institution for European Affairs, after living two years making more money than his parents together in the country that literally invented capitalism, claiming that he believes in communism. As you can see, it is pretty obvious that capitalism benefits me way more than any other system. Here in post-communist Europe, I have to say I really feel guilty sometimes of arguing about it with my Slavic colleagues. Who the fuck am I to tell them that the system (even if it was not really, at all, the type of communism I believe in, but that's how it got branded) that was forced into their countries and repressed their parents and grandparents is "good"? Me, the guy from Portugal that sure, had the longest fascist dictatorship in Europe but even that (!) was taken down with a peaceful revolution? Do I really have a moral ground here?

This stroke me, even more, yesterday, when we had the Ukrainian Day in the college and watched a documentary about the Euromaidan revolution - for those of the one billion people that are reading this and may not know what it is about, it was when Ukrainians protested for months against the decision of their president/gangster at the time not to sign a trade deal with the EU and, instead, licking Putin's ass. This relates directly to the influence Russia still has in the country since the Soviet times, as well as in Belarus where there are daily protests happening since the summer and good, peaceful, innocent people are being put into jail, disappearing, and sometimes even dying. The documentary ended and I saw a Ukrainian crying, a Georgian was emotional and I also got tears coming to my eyes at some point. However, what the fuck do I know? I can comfort them, I can say I understand but do I really? Do I really know what is like? Even to protest against the anti-abortion laws in Poland I decided or at least didn't make the effort to change it, to have a birthday dinner at my place. Am I really doing the best I can to support the causes I believe in? Seeing photos of the protest days later and knowing that it forced the government to, at least, delay the publication and implementation of the ruling, really made me feel like I should have been there. The same feeling I had when watching the Euromaidan protests as well as the anti-War movement demonstrations in the US portrayed by the Chicago Seven.

Maybe, and hopefully, I will never be able to understand the things I just described. And maybe this survivor's guilt, as in survivor of a racist, exploitative, corrupt system, will be with me forever - even if I firmly believe that, if I die by natural causes, I will still witness the end of capitalism. I just hope I will be able to directly contribute to change, and I mean way more than just our economic system: I mean ending neocolonialism, ending racism, ending patriarchy, ending homophobia. Because I am, since the day I was born, part of all of these problems. And it is my duty not to be complicit with evil because this isn't just about me: it's about all of us.