“We all came to say our last goodbye to Pina, a man of dreams”: Dino D’Santiago’s lament
Dino D’Santiago shared, on social media, a tribute to Carlos Pina, one of the fatal victims of the shooting that took place in Lisbon last Wednesday.
“’Lisbon is no longer the city we grew up in’. This was the bitter whisper I heard as soon as I stepped into the Alto de São João cemetery, on the cold morning of today”, he began by writing. “We all came to say our last goodbye to Pina, a man of dreams, father of six children, including our Gonçalo”.
The musician, who was in Cape Verde at the time of the tragedy, added: “I hear about false reckonings, murmurs of hatred that spread like weeds. Some take advantage, spreading disunity among the people, as if chaos gave them food. But what happened is not just a tragedy of blood. It is the poisoned fruit of our indifference, the reflection of the valleys of silence where we have chosen to live, comfortable in our blindness.”
“Three adults and a son who was still resting in his mother’s womb died, but society only knew how to talk about labels: ‘an African barber’, ‘a pregnant Brazilian’, ‘a taxi driver’. And to make the discrimination even more grotesque, the murderer was immediately identified as ‘a gypsy’. As if the tragedy could be explained, as if the deaths could be justified with these stereotypes. A label for each life, an excuse for our indifference”, he said.
“We live in an era of networks where the word ‘social’ has lost all meaning. We ignore the truth that screams before us: that this was the result of a sick mind, neglected for years. A man who walked lost through the city streets, while we all looked away. What happened in Lisbon is a mirror of what is happening around the world, where hatred is replicated, whether due to power, prejudice, machismo, xenophobia, or any other poison that corrupts us. Every shot fired, every life taken, is the symptom of a deeper disease – we, humans, have become the most lethal virus on this planet.”
