Writing about cachaça during dark times

I’ve spent a lot of time offering a representation of myself. Anything that could be enough to encourage people to like me on the internet. On this medium, everyone gets to decide what the world sees of them, usually offering nothing besides happiness, frozen in time.

It’s not easy being a good blogger (not claiming to be one by the way), being genuine and still professional. Can I share personal thoughts on subjects outside of the very narrow aperture I’ve scoped for my writing? Is that recommended?

I restarted this blog about six months ago, having failed miserably the first time around. And I decided to restart this blog because I’d just left a job, unexpectedly. It’s not necessary for me to go into details, suffice to say that while it was my choice to leave the position, it wasn’t what I wanted. It was a job I took because I thought it would be an incredible opportunity to have a truly positive impact on the world. It turned out to be a nightmare.

Anyway, there I was, in October 2019, thinking about what to do with myself. Immediately, I felt myself drawn back to the idea of writing about cachaça. That being said, I still didn’t know anything about it.

I’d started going to a monthly luncheon here in Brasilia where producers from all around the country come to present their products. It’s a great deal: 45 reais includes a great lunch and all the cachaça you can drink. After I first attended one of those events, I realized there was a whole community dedicated to consuming and talking about this important cultural artifact, which really, pretty much, remains uniquely Brazilian.

I wanted to learn more.

Understanding other cultures and perspectives has always been important to me, merely because of who I am. I am the son of an African American father and Jewish mother. My life has always been a cross-cultural exchange.

This exploration of cachaça has always been about, and will continue to be about understanding culture. But culture doesn’t live in isolation, it is shaped by the people and institutions in a society.

And existential questions persist when I see institutions fail to live up to what I consider to be low expectations. How much do we value the lives of our fellow citizens, or fellow humans? Are we willing to watch them get beaten and tear gassed because they are angry about an unarmed man unjustly killed? Are we going to allow people to die because they threaten certain people’s perceptions of the world?

Cachaça is by no means an answer to these questions or the problems we face as a global community. But it is a thread of our humanity, a piece of our world culture. It deserves attention and respect, though not as much as we must pay one another. We cannot put objects, cultural or physical, on a pedestal and dismiss people. Without each other, we, as individuals, are nothing. Isolated humans deteriorate mentally and physically. We are the creators of culture and the more we understand about each other, the more we can begin to see each other’s humanity and build a greater world built on trust and mutual respect.