2021 will be another infamous year to rant about in retrospect. When we thought that 2020 could not get any worse, 2021 stood up and made quite a spectacle. Now we know that 2022 can be even worse.
From no vaccines, to too many, to who knows what the hell they will come up with.
It was a good year, though (all things considered). I survived, and so did my closest relatives. This is especially significant after witnessing the death of so many friends and friends of friends. These lives were not lost to a mortal virus; they were lost to a mortal political and ideological system that ruinous as it is, made us so vulnerable that now we can easily die because of the dumbest causes imaginable.
It was a great year for #Hive as a platform, as a community, as an alternative Social Media and social agent of change.
I met new friends here this year and strengthened some old acquaintances. I posted with more consistency and can’t complain about the curation and interaction with fellow hivers. I brought more friends to the platform and we have been able to help family and friends thanks to Hive. That alone is priceless.
There were some plans that we could not materialize, but we learned along the way and will try again next year.

Now the Rant
My last rant of the year is more about a certain mentality that got ingrained in my fellow Venezuelans’ psyche. We seem to have been programmed not only to accept chaos, mediocrity, and corruption, but to encourage it and bring down whatever stands in opposition to all that.
If someone paints a wall, there will be plenty of people willing to leave the print of their soles. If someone plants a tree; there will be plenty of kids and adults willing to kill it before it can grow.
I’ll give you just one crazy example I lived yesterday.
In the last years, many entrepreneurships have emerged around certain businesses. The prices of some products went so high that it forced consumers to look for alternatives. It also allowed some business people, and even people who had never before had businesses, to improvise and create options and opportunities to satisfy a market and fill in a gap in the food chain, so to speak.
Take cleaning products, for instance. Some chemists came up with cheaper alternatives to produce bleach, disinfectants, liquid soap, among other products. Immediately, these businesses controlled the market. Why pay 1-2$ for a brand bleach or dishwasher when you could get the same product for half the price? People stopped buying brand products and long lines started to form in front of the life-saving home-made-cleaning-product sellers.
It did not take too long for others to copy the model and for the smartest entrepreneurs to branch out and grow.
There is no need now to stand in line to buy any cheap, high-quality cleaning product. Well, that would be in a normal country. Not here.
I walk a lot and take many pictures of price charts in different places. I was able to try different products from different manufacturers. With a few exceptions (of watered down products), all of them are equally good and cheap.
That’s why I cannot understand why on earth, especially under the current sanitary crisis, people would create this kind of chaos to buy a product they can get even cheaper in a line-free/virus-free place.
“We love disorder”; that’s what people say. “We love bad things,” the add. I’ve gotten to the conclusion that those voices are right. It applies to politics, to cultural events, to supporting celebrities, to civil duties, and to social interaction.
We have learned nothing after 20 years of nefarious “socialist” experiments; we learned nothing after 2 years of biological/geopolitical experiments; and we learned nothing after the most dramatic evidence of the futility of religion/superstition (especially for health-related crises). I do not have great expectations about 2022 when it comes to national change, reform, progress, awareness, or whatever may lead to social transformation and prosperity.
I have plenty or evidence to be skeptical, and yet, I still keep a dim corner in my mind reserved for a miracle (if the word could ever be used in a non-religious sense).
Thanks for stopping by. Happy New Year, everyone. Count your Blessings!
