Animal Farm | So powerful and so poor!

Albano Martins

Sometimes I think that there are very unusual things going on in this world, such as the wrath of Mother Nature, increasingly sour with her s.o.b. children.

Thirty-nine people died in a lorry in the U.K. looking for El Dorado.

Man is miserable and is making the world in its image, despite supposedly being made in the image of God.

It seems that evil comes from all over – churches, governments, parties, the globalized and dehumanized business world, and what counts is the dollar sign and not the people, nature or our animal partners.

There are presidents who believe that what is happening in this world are mere mirages in their desert of ideas.

In Macau, we continue to push the “city” with a full belly but an empty head.

We do not find the beauty in our streets, nor any pleasure in seeing things organized, practical and done in an acceptable and timely manner.

A cost-benefit analysis would make almost every intervention a painful exercise of deficit, not of ideas, but of results. Arriving at Macau through the Outer Harbor, we come across third-world taxi drivers and the dirty entrance of a car park with walls wishing for a fresh coat of paint, for almost decades.

Then we see the Guia tunnel, which should have two very clear continuous lines in the middle, but instead has traffic barriers, a sign of the infantilism that rules our roads.

We descend upon Avenida da Amizade towards the city center, and we see the same traffic barriers. Everywhere there are traffic barriers on the road!

There are streets which have been closed for ages, and we just cannot understand why.

Everything is turned into a permanent shipyard, even where there is no work. This is a sign that there is no imagination or competence put to solving very simple problems.

If these simple problems have gone unresolved for decades, now imagine the complication of joining the Greater Bay altogether.

The Greater Bay Area would see people moving around, cars coming and going, the search for the best consumer goods, or the best port, synergies that can multiply everyone’s added value, different tax systems, different laws, different people (although mostly Chinese). It would have a huge potential!

Instead, we have cars with triple-license plates, expensive bridges used in quota systems where only those who have authorization have access, a CEPA deal that fills an entire library locked down by bureaucracy and the fear of trade.

After all, what is wanted is simply “control.”

This is control against the contamination of systems and people.

We have a country with two systems that would not match up.

It seems that what will happen is simply a final exercise of pure cannibalism. Who will eat whom?

Control prevents the exponentiation of mutual advantage.

What is simple, rational, and interesting becomes complicated, and the issues that complicate this marriage of the two systems are solved only by the hammer.

This is all too irrational!

Macau without the Chinese mainland is nothing.

The people in Macau are treated childishly, in the streets, in arguments, and even in advertising!

The tourism authority would be happy if Macau to have millions of more tourists every year.

The hotel occupancy rate today is 1.5 nights per visitor and 27 years ago was almost the same, 1.22 nights!

Macau is unable to enjoy the enormous modernization effort that casinos brought to this land.

Barcelona with eight million visitors no longer wants more tourism.

Venice is desperate with 30 million tourists.

But Macau will only be pleased when no one can move at all!