Sinpapeles

I once heard the late João Saldanha trying to explain why sports announcers said so much nonsense: “go there and speak for 90 straight minutes without stopping, otherwise the listener thinks the radio went off the air and changes stations, you’ll end up saying nonsense, you will…”

I remembered this after hearing (and reading) so much in the “media” that Flamengo’s training center did not have a certain “permit” (as good rivals rival each other in everything, it seems that the training centers of Vasco, Botafogo and Fluminense also do not have the said “permit”).

As if that were not enough, we were abundantly informed, in detail, that the supermarket that caught fire in Madureira this week, with two dead, had a grocery-store and bakery permit, but not a supermarket permit!

And the helicopter that crashed with Boechat had all the paperwork up to date, it could do reports and aerial inspections with journalists or technicians on board, but it was not licensed to transport passengers. Boechat on that flight “was” a passenger! Irregular, therefore.

It gives the impression that the reporter believes that, if the correct permits had been there, the catastrophes would not have occurred, and public opinion, that of the simpler people, who are the majority, begins to think that too!

Since nothing is that simple, the Brumadinho dam had all its papers in order, including permits and the CREA paperwork (Regional Engineering Council), thus making what happened inexplicable (this contradiction has not been properly recorded).

The journalist and writer Sérgio Porto, Stanislaw Ponte Preta, a contemporary of Saldanha, who wrote around 1968 the book “Fê-Bê-A-Pá” (The Festival of Nonsense that Plagues the Country), would not forgive his little colleagues.

I ask myself whether the professionals who devote themselves to these comments and analyses do so for lack of subject matter or because of intellectual limitation, because nowadays, with videotape and “editing”, there is no longer Saldanha’s excuse. Or is it that journalists, like engineers, are so poorly paid that only inexperienced people or people with low IQs can be obtained, resulting in these “field cub reporters” who can only see such nonsense?

These things show that our propensity for bureaucracy and nonsense is immeasurable.

Xenophobia says as much. People who are persecuted, with nowhere to go, or merely hungry, who happen to arrive here, face a “via crucis” while they cannot gather the unnecessary paperwork. Meanwhile, we get irritated when compatriots go through the same thing abroad. In Catalonia (Spain), an illegal Brazilian immigrant, who remains anonymous certainly because of the tolerance of some “enlightened” person from the State, is becoming famous for tagging walls with a word that sums all this up: SINPAPELES (without papers). Identity documents, even if provisional, must be granted quickly and simply, both as a humanitarian attitude and as presence control, avoiding clandestinity.

It is necessary to understand that records or papers from CREAs, CRMs and the like are merely revenue-collecting and useless. No one has the “gift” of engineering or medicine because they are obligatorily registered with a council. The journalists did very well in not accepting the bureaucracy of a professional council. They need to help the other areas of activity free themselves from these anachronistic bureaucrats, not value them.

Keeping silent may be politically correct, it may be fear of retaliation, but it makes it seem that intelligent life is disappearing. HELP!!!!!!!

Published on the Clube de Engenharia website - https://portalclubedeengenharia.org.br/2019/02/16/sem-alvara-sem-crea-sinpapeles/

Miguel Fernández y Fernández, engineer, chronicler and columnist, member of the National Academy of Engineering and of the Institute of Engineering # written on Feb 16, 2019, 9,054 characters.