Tuesday (28), "13-year-old student stabs teacher to death in SP". Wednesday (29), "Covid kills 700 thousand and victimizes the more vulnerable groups". It's not every week that two headlines in a row from Folha use the same verb. If only the problem was the lack of creativity on the First Page.

The country is so violent that it is difficult to distinguish the various waves of the problem. The memory suggested that attacks on schools were becoming frequent, but it is scary to know that since August last year, they have occurred monthly. The explosion of cases, experts say, is due to the isolation during the pandemic and the prolonged closure of schools, but also to the negative influence of social networks, online games, extremism, misogyny, and toxic masculinity. More than 700 thousand people have died as a result of the virus, others will be reaped by related strains. It's not just the verb that brings the news together.

On the same day as the Vila Sônia tragedy, a 28-year-old woman invaded her former school in Nashville, USA, and shot three 9-year-old children and three teachers. She carried an AR15-style assault rifle, similar to the HK that Jair Bolsonaro lamented having to return along with the Arabian jewels. HK is the German brand that left the Brazilian market in 2019 after pressure from shareholders; the company's product, they realized, was being used against their own people by an irresponsible government. HK is the rifle used by an ex-military policeman to assassinate Marielle Franco. The 13-year-old used a knife in São Paulo but tried to buy a gun online. As Elio Gaspari would say, those who don't even understand what the Disarmament Statute is for get a CAC ( hunter, sport shooter, and collector) card.

It will always be difficult to dissociate Bolsonarism from its performance in the pandemic, the delay in vaccination, the neglect of education, the environmental damage, and the gun violence, to mention just a few well-documented points of its legacy. Political polarization certainly worsens perception. Hence the aggravation of many Folha readers with the editorial "Bolsonaro's back", published on Thursday night (30) on the website and altered the following morning along with the publishing of an 'Erramos' (errata).

In the article, which articulates hypotheses about the former president's role from now on, the last paragraph brings the following assumption: "Bolsonarism could even, if it abandoned violence and authoritarianism, lead a healthy opposition to the PT government. This is not, unfortunately, the most likely outcome".

The sentence would already be polemical enough, but by chance, the errata magnified it: "Due to an editorial error, a previous version of this editorial was published, with a different conclusion from the one approved for the printed edition". The "different conclusion", which social networks saved and bombed back to the ombudsman, is that "Bolsonarism can bring vigor to Brazilian politics". In other words, the editor's initial intention, even more controversial, was curbed, nurturing the idea that Folha is anti-PT or, apparently, Bolsonarist.

There is a considerable difference between the two flaws just go back to the beginning of the week or the beginning of this column. Or to August 2022, when Folha loudly denounced Bolsonarism's attacks on democracy, and the spiral of fury in schools silently began. "If you gave up violence and authoritarianism" it would still not be an option, shout the readers.

STRONG IMAGES

The country imports American conservatism, but not the itch to dismiss violent images in the media. On Monday (27), much of the national press, including Folha, aired what happened at the Vila Sônia school. In mid-afternoon, the newspaper took down the video with no further explanation. On TV Globo, the exposure was shortened as the day went on. In the end, during Jornal Nacional ( the evening news program), the video was interrupted moments before the attack on the teacher. The explanation was that the violence present in the footage prohibited them from showing the full video.

In both vehicles, the opportunity to explain to the public that the scenes and even the news surrounding them could stimulate new similar events was wasted, as shown by studies.

The case in Nashville, however, produced an important inflection. If the initial writing was maintained, without images of the attack or of the victims, the following day was marked by the release of six edited minutes of images from the body cameras of agents who invaded the school and killed the shooter. It's not a new strategy or transparency, just a reaction to a debate that stemmed from a previous massacre when accusations of leniency surfaced. The police, there and here, think only of themselves when they provide images.

The New York Times described the scenes in text format but did not publish them. The Washington Post ran them. It bears an absurd resemblance to a video game, except that the life lost is a real one.

_{Translated by Cassy Dias}