The Nightmare of Being Corrupt

I recently saw Woody Allen’s powerful film Blue Jasmine. I think it fits perfectly in a Venezuela, and a world, like today’s, where some people will do anything (and when I say anything, I mean anything!) to have more and more and more…

Avarice has become one of the most common capital sins today. Unfortunately, that sin comes together with another, envy, and that is when you hear or read remarks from the “new rich” that betray a deep complex about what, deep down, they will never be able to become.

What amazes me most about all this is that 21st-century corrupt people are not ashamed of what they do, and they rub what they have stolen in other people’s faces. Don’t they feel embarrassed? Recently I was telling my father that the corrupt of the Fourth Republic are babies in diapers next to today’s. Because if anyone says that a person who suddenly buys a plane, a yacht, a mansion and so on has earned it honestly, not even he believes it. We all know that Honest work, with a capital H, does not make you rich from one day, one month or one year to the next. That’s the truth!

Blue Jasmine shows us what the “sad” life of a corrupt man and his family is like. It is a life that fills up with vices and ends up becoming a real nightmare. The film’s main character shows, in a masterful performance, how a wife can “look the other way” and pretend not to see her husband’s corrupt dealings, keeping quiet (in our words, being an accomplice) so that he can give her all the luxuries she wants: clothes, handbags, yachts, planes, trips, mansions, jewelry and so on.

But sooner or later everyone pays for the harm they have done. If not on this earth, then when God calls them to account. Although lately we have seen that quite a few are already paying for their misdeeds here on earth. That is the case in the film, which, like some real-life cases known through the media, ends in tragedy.

I want to share here part of a homily I heard in church a few Sundays ago. The priest said: “Today I want to speak especially to the wives. Yes, yes, to the wives. Because sometimes you put a lot of pressure on your husbands and start asking them for things they can’t give you: I want the trip so-and-so took with her family, I want the handbag or the jewel that what’s-her-name had, and so on. Be considerate of them, because they suffer a lot over this and are capable of doing anything to please you.”

I liked that homily very much, and it is very true. I could say that behind every great corrupt man there is a wife who let it happen, either because she was truly blind or because she pretended not to see, so that the “little things” she liked would keep coming.

It seems corruption blinds people. Last week Pope Francis once again spoke about the corrupt in one of his homilies. He said it is very difficult for a corrupt person to be converted, because they are so busy with their own affairs. And this from a Pope who lived his whole life in Argentina, seeing many cases of corruption.

I end this article with the same thought I took to bed the day I saw Blue Jasmine, which I told my husband before going to sleep: how wonderful it is to be honest, even if sometimes we don’t have enough for the essentials. There is definitely nothing like honesty and having nothing to hide. That is priceless!

The best thing we can do in this life, as wives, is never! allow our husbands to become corrupt. They say the man is the one in charge, but we all know that’s not true: we women are the ones in charge, and in the end they always do what we ask of them, unless they are already corrupt.

In the same way, the best thing a mother and father can do for their children is to raise them, above all, to be Honest. And for them to learn it to the very marrow, they have to see us always working, earning our daily bread with our sweat.

Example, the same example many of our grandparents and parents gave us, is worth more than a thousand words. Today we urgently need examples of honesty and of detachment from material things.

If you don’t want your life to become a nightmare, as in Blue Jasmine, live facing God, live honestly. It is one of the best deals we can make here on earth, and we will be fully happy, in spite of everything.