Forty-nine years after first passing the Hercílio Luz Bridge, time when cars were driving on wooden trails, I return to it on December 30, 2019 to celebrate its reopening and relive the emotions of my eleven years: the balance of the bridge, the dimensions, the engineering...
But I also came across watching the behavior of the people who were there, now with lots of ways to "like" and "share": cell phones, camcorders, drones, skateboards, bikes, bungee jump ... things that didn`t exist in my childhood and were not imagined by the builders of the early 1920s.
Other times, another generation but really more than a postcard, monument or historical heritage, today I could see how much the Hercílio Luz Bridge is configured as an element of integration; not only between continental and island land, but between people.
I saw the older ones remembering the old days and the younger ones experiencing of feeling the heritage that belongs to them. I have seen people of all kinds appropriating of what really belongs to them, their inheritance. I saw in their faces the feeling of belonging, the feeling of truly being part of a larger whole.
Today I saw the Santa Catarina family smile, spontaneously talking, fraternizing, dancing, recording their selfies, interacting with each other: a feeling that I did not realize for a long time in this proportion.
I return home happy certain that we are increasingly learning from past mistakes and rescuing what is genuinely ours: our material goods, history, origins, culture, and what is most important for consolidation of our identity as a people: unity, our greatest asset!
I think that perhaps this is really the feeling we should start 2020: recognizing in the other person a part of the whole to which I am also inserted.
Happy New Year!
Ruy Luiz Machado
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