On March 12th, the previous issue of Prémio was duly printed and ready to be distributed. Its content was posted on its website – www.revistapremio.pt – but the magazine was not distributed. A pandemic affected everything and everyone and, despite the resilience of some, such as the CTT (postal service) employees, Prémio did not reach its recipients. It was an unexpected anomaly. As if everything had been completely disconnected, like those movies where extra-terrestrials invade Earth and everything becomes a desert of destruction.

Three months have elapsed and Prémio is back again. And it will be back on its site. Always in Portuguese and English so that CV&A Customers and Partners can access the best information about what we do… together with them.

Prémio is obviously a magazine that looks to the future and that does not tell your dreams, but also does not uncover misfortunes and doesn’t live of scandals either. Particularly those that are not a scandal yet but which some would like it to become.

In order to build we all need a less virtual reality than the one we live in. A reality lived with planning, with strategy, more serene, less tactical and lived on social media and to the second. Less focused on media coverage and on the covers of newspapers, magazines or top stories on TV news. We need that those who have the duty to guide the destinies of nations do exercise their responsibility, forgetting for a few months the vote hunting and the need to please their political clientele.

I cannot and should not go engage in further personal considerations. Prémio is the magazine of all our customers and partners and each one should see in it a media that is there to express opinion (it is quarterly and only by sheer coincidence do relevant “news” come up, in the sense of new facts). None of our readers should feel constrained by the political opinions of this magazine’s editor.

The world has been through hard times. Before the Pandemic, Brexit took place in the European Union, there was unrest in the United States of America and oil suffered a brutal fall, affected the economy in the process. During the Pandemic, bankruptcies, lay-offs, unemployment and the resulting social unrest began, some world leaders showed little common sense – to put it nicely – the first reflexes of a society that started to live without living appeared, along with exaggerations between people of the same race, the HUMAN race, exaggerations that were used by some who never build but take advantage of everything to destroy, people who live from hatred, there was lockdown followed by lockdown easing.

And one expected – I hope that hope will be there (sorry for all the cacophony) – much good sense from some agents of the political, judicial and media powers when conducting this difficult reality. Many showed this capacity. Others, in their eagerness to please their ego and the entourage of friends or voters, got lost. Justice is taken in the media in light of the belief that cases will be lost in court. Demonstrations are organized with five thousand people close to each other – at a time when we know that we should be physically away from each other – attacking a Racist Portugal that does not exist. Of course, there are racists in Portugal, as in the whole world. In all the species of the human race. Members of Parliament attack the country and shame democracy, reinforcing xenophobic beliefs. In other continents history is destroyed, as if breaking statues would erase the less good acts of the past and as if the past could be judged in light of today’s thinking. The past exists and the present and the future are only what they are because they are the sum of the virtues and defects, the acts and omissions of all those who played an important role in the construction of the World.

It’s all quite sad! Poor! And I don’t mean economic poverty.

The Portuguese government ruled well in general during the most severe phase of the pandemic. I mean the support to society in general, to citizens – even to those who have always avoided taxes and whom we now call agents of the informal economy – and to private economy. Of course, there were serious failures. And who would not fail in the face of such a situation. Rui Rio, the opposition leader, had the right attitude in almost all occasions. In Madeira, the Regional Government did a very good job in controlling the Pandemic. The President of the Republic supported the Government. He delivered a great speech on the 10th of June – Day of Portugal, Camões and the Portuguese Communities.

I would like to talk about other countries. But what I know is what I read, see and hear. But that’s not enough and, above all, I don’t always believe what I read, see and hear. Because other media, other than Prémio, have clear editorial options and can make the statements they want, when and how they want.

I only ask that, in Portugal, there will be some respect when talking about those who pay taxes. Just to give an example, I could not fail to express here my astonishment at the concerted attack on the electricity utility EDP – I would like to state here that EDP is a CV&A customer in special projects – for distributing dividends, forgetting that, when it does so, its “large” shareholders pay taxes in Portugal – and not in the Netherlands – and the small shareholders are remunerated for their small investments in shares that they never have in bank deposits. I am not talking about legal proceedings, because it’s up to justice to solve this. It’s not up, as has been sometimes the case, to vigilantes who use the media to please their ego.

June 10, Portugal Day, is also the day of our greatest poet: Luis Vaz de Camões. And the Lusiads have a word at the end that has to be banned from our dictionary: envy. And, by the way, please do discover two vaccines, urgently: one against hate and another to inoculate common sense in the world.