It is too easy lately to blame third parties for all our ills, often with indisputable reasons; for example, the famous “country situation” that has afflicted us in Venezuela for years, with all its objective causes and consequences, plus the pandemic of course. While it is true that reality has touched us dramatically and its impact on all aspects of life cannot be minimized, using the emergency exit only, just blaming politicians, the market, boss, neighbor, etc., is a temptation that should not exempt anyone from our responsibility.

“With great power comes great responsibility” is not a common practice in our latitudes for those who possess it, but it is an attitude which each of us can possess within our realm. Not taking care of ourselves in the face of Covid-19, not helping a neighbor or the needy, leaving spaces where we could do a job and give our contribution is our responsibility. I’m referring not only to a duty, but rather to the etymological sense of responsibility, from the Latin responsāre, “to respond.” We are all able to respond because we have received gifts and talents. Furthermore, we have a greater call to respond now because of the moments we are living.

But it often happens that «no one has the courage to say: ‘me’», as Kierkegaard affirms (Journals, Rizzoli Bur, Milan, 1983), and this has serious consequences because it means that the misuse of “power”, of any type, has come to conquer up our own square inch of personal responsibility and then, also, of prominence.

What is the antidote to this lack of personal responsibility? Where do you get the courage to say “me”? To what extent can the value of a “me” have an impact on a change in history?

Although we witness different forms of absurd violence against human beings and the planet (revolutions, wars, genocides, ecological crimes, etc.), many of us agree on the importance of education and the promotion of human values ​​to face these problems, but it seems not to be enough.

In his Journals, Kierkegaard says that “values ​​are abstract until someone has the courage to say ‘me”. In order to educate and transmit chore values ​​it is necessary to have testimonies that embody and live them; there begins the impulse for our freedom to move, with courage, to be responsible.

If we look carefully, we can recognize simple people who live in a different way and are worth following, simply because they have had the courage to say “me”; and then get involved in a responsible way from the smallest in our home to the public areas. It is a spectacle to see that movement in a person, because in addition to becoming a protagonist, freedom exudes.