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Sad faces all round as Bolivia’s clowns protest over decree threatening their livelihoods | Bolivia
Dozens of clowns have marched through the streets of Bolivia’s capital to protest against a government decree that limits extracurricular activities in schools, threatening their livelihoods.
Wearing full face paint and their signature red noses, the clowns gathered on Monday in front of the ministry of education in La Paz to oppose a decree published in February. The new mandate says schools must comply with 200 days of lessons each year – in effect banning them from hosting the special events where the entertainers are frequently employed.
Clowns in Bolivia are often hired for school festivities to entertain children during breaks from their regular lessons. One such event is Children’s Day, which the country celebrates on 12 April.
“This decree will economically affect all of us who work with children,” said Wilder Ramírez, a leader of the local clown union, who also goes by the name of Zapallito. The clown told journalists that “children need to laugh”, while his colleagues wondered if Bolivia’s education minister had ever had a childhood.
The decree issued by the government of the recently elected president, Rodrigo Paz, says celebrations will no longer be authorised during regular school days, though they can be held voluntarily on weekends. Government officials said they would take the clowns’ critiques into account when they make a decree for the 2027 school year.
But those assurances provided little relief to the clowns protesting on Monday.
“This decree will diminish our income, and with the economic crisis the country is going through, our future looks increasingly gloomy,” said Elías Gutiérrez, a spokesperson for the Confederation of Artisanal Workers of Bolivia.
Bolivia is grappling with its worst economic crisis in decades. Revenues from natural gas are plummeting after a sustained decline in production, and US dollars are becoming scarce, making imports more expensive in the landlocked nation.
Tailors who work with clowns and make dresses for children for cultural events and photographers who typically cover school celebrations joined Monday’s protest.
Clowns, photographers and costume makers marched through the centre of La Paz, blowing whistles and setting off small fireworks.
One of the clowns carried a sign that blamed the government for “taking away smiles, and taking work away”.
Derek Roberts, who had planned to stand for the Senedd until he quit, now works for Member of the Senedd Gaz Thomas.
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Doomscrolling: is it really worth five years of your one wild and precious life? | Social media
Name: Doomscrolling.
Age: The term first emerged in 2018, but took off in 2020 (when the doom got especially heavy).
Appearance: All-consuming.
Of course it’s all-consuming! Have you seen the horrors going on out there? War, climate collapse, AI … We need to stay informed: the robot apocalypse is coming, and I, for one, intend to be ready. Intentionally consuming news from reliable sources is one thing, but do you have any idea how much time you spend inadvertently making yourself scared and angry on your phone?
No, and I suspect this is not information I will enjoy learning. Definitely not. New survey data suggests people might spend up to five years of their waking lives doomscrolling.
What? That cannot be right – break it down for me. Well, a Virgin Media O2 survey of more than 6,000 people across the UK has found that 36% of our phone use is “unintentional”. That’s automatically flicking between apps and checking our phones out of habit, idly letting our thumbs show us all the most upsetting, frightening things out there (interspersed with adverts for protein powder and podcasts).
Mine are for Dubai and mindfulness apps, but go on. That’s an hour and 26 minutes a day, or 41,000 hours in a lifetime (for someone who gets a smartphone aged 10 and survives to the predicted average age of 88).
My doomscrolling suggests it’s unlikely any of us will be surviving to 88 soon. But that is shocking. It’s four years and eight months, somewhere between the lifespan of a feral pigeon and a ferret.
A weird way to put it, but OK. Fine. In four years and eight months, a human goes from a helpless larva to a fully fledged person with bladder control and opinions about Bluey.
Better. Just think what you could do in that time. You could do a PhD, you could go to veterinary school and find out how to extend feral pigeon lifespans, you could write 107 romance novels (if you match Barbara Cartland’s 1976 record of 23) … You could go to Jupiter (almost, theoretically)!
I could not do any of that. Maybe not, but you can certainly do better things with your one wild and precious life than “unintentionally” scrolling through infinite horrors on your phone because a bunch of irresponsible billionaires precision-engineered it that way. Study something fun, travel, volunteer …
You’re right, but how? As you say, the billionaires have stitched us up. In 2020, journalist Karen Ho created a Twitter “doomscrolling reminder bot” that issued helpful nightly reminders (“Hey, are you doomscrolling?”) to encourage people to stop. Surely now it would be easy to get AI to do something similar, but customised for each of us?
Are you saying this is something the technology my doomscrolling has made me terrified of could actually help with? Who knows, but stranger things have happened.
Do say: “Hey, are you doomscrolling?”
Don’t say: “You have 10 seconds to stop before your robot overlord administers your mandated punishment.”
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