#ChangeBrazil

This Sunday, I attended a protest for change in Brazil with a few friends, most of them Brazilian themselves. Hundreds of people gathered in Cambridge, a number helped by the fact that Boston itself is a major destination for Brazilian emigrants. The signs they held up got the message across: Brazilians are angry, and rightfully so, that their government seems to care more about soccer standings than education, that their natural resource wealth is being squandered on stadiums while their people starve, that the government has been becoming more of an oligarchy, and that the benefits of economic development have yet to make a difference in ordinary Brazilians’ lives. The protests across the world were sparked by an increase in bus fares, but have expanded to encompass the multitudes of grievances Brazilians share against their government.

All photos courtesy of yours truly

Protests Are Apparently Super "In" Right Now (and Spreading Like Wildfire!)

In 2011, the world was stunned as protests spread from Tunisia to Egypt to eventually nearly every country in the Middle East. In the most severe cases, such as Tunisia and Egypt, those protests quickly morphed into violent battles between citizens disillusioned with their government and the military desperately propping that government up. Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya have all undergone a transition to a new government after the old ones fell - in Syria, the final outcome of the "Arab Spring" remains to be seen. However, it was a transformational period not just for the region, but for the entire world.

Now, in two countries on two different continents are undergoing some of the biggest and potentially most violent protests the world has seen since 2011 (not including the ongoing crisis in Syria). Turkey is in the midst of its third week of dealing with outraged citizens. The tensions appear to be escalating, with the Turkish deputy Prime Minister announcing this week that the Turkish army may have to step in to end the riots for good. The gravity of the situation, as I wrote last week, is severe. Turkey may be losing out for good on their bid to join the E.U., and Prime Minister Erdogan's reputation as being a beacon of hope for the possibility of secularism across the Middle East is waning rapidly.