Chile’s Reckoning

I followed those Chile protests almost by accident, drawn into coverage of what thousands of young people were actually refusing: Piñera’s version of education, the math that said you’d go into impossible debt just to become anything. What struck me was the stubbornness of it—not media fury but a refusal, a basic no to the future they were being sold. Piñera thought anger fades if ignored, but that’s a fundamental misread. When a generation knows the system is designed to break them anyway, they don’t leave. They stayed. The demands got bigger. Not everything changed, but they proved something governments always count on us forgetting: that enough people saying no actually works.