Velho do Restelo

I still get very surprised when I see very radical comments made by young people about times past, when they were not even contemporary, preventing them to have an objective view of these events.

To speak only well of the regime of Salazar and Marcelo Caetano, praising virtues and never talking about all that was harmful to freedom, to the modernization of the civil society and the international isolation that have been imposed to Portugal for decades, it's scary and disturbing.

Not recognize that times have changed and the winds of history proclaim democracy, freedom and dialogue as the ingredients for peace is to be a reactionary and a demagogue.

We must assume that the nostalgia of the good things has no use for the progress of the people and what interests us is to adapt to the times that come with the perspective of positivism, critical analysis, respecting the values and traditions of the past that are dynamic and can evoluate.

It is heartbreaking, though, to see how the right is losing the host of the younger classes by a permanent nostalgia of the past and a radicalism on their ideas.