Parenting & Family Quote by Ricardo Lagos

Lagos stacks his duties like a ledger, and that’s the point: the moral math of politics is never just about today’s voters. By naming “the innocent” first, he frames public power as a custodial job, not a prize - a rebuke to the easy cynicism that treats collateral damage as an acceptable line item. Then he pivots to “the dead,” pulling memory into the realm of policy. In Latin America, and especially in Chile, the dead are not metaphorical. They are the disappeared, the executed, the unresolved crimes of dictatorship. Invoking them is a demand that democratic stability not be purchased with amnesia.

The line’s quiet trick is how it stretches time without sounding abstract. “The living” anchors the sentiment in immediate governance: jobs, rights, security, the daily grind of a state that must work. But the phrase doesn’t linger there. Lagos yanks the horizon outward to “our children and their children,” turning intergenerational responsibility into a political constraint. It’s a way of arguing for reforms that outlast a term - social investment, institutional legitimacy, environmental stewardship - while also shaming short-termism as a kind of theft from the future.

Subtext: reconciliation is not the same as forgetting, and modernizing a country is not permission to sever its moral accounts. The repetition of “towards” is deliberate; it’s directional language that implies accountability. Obligations aren’t feelings. They’re debts a society chooses either to honor or to deny.