Presidente de AmchamSpain (EE.UU Chamber of Commerce in Spain)
Surely some reader will think that this is the reflection of a Spanish nationalist. Well, no. This is, quite simply, the humble opinion of a Catalan with a rooted tradition of prudent and pragmatic Catalanism, who as a large majority – too much time silenced – loves his land intensely and therefore abjures all those fools who want to ruin it.
Years go by – milestone after milestone, Diada after Diada – and the most unfortunate predictions are coming true. While the extraordinary official propaganda machinery, with its public media, its celebrated social gatherings, its fed social networks and its international influence is dedicated to emotionally masking the true consequences of this escape to nowhere, reality is imposed as a cold and bare slab .
It is the beginning of a hangover that comes after the end of a frivolous
and noisy party in the heart of Europe. And it is at the end of this party,
when the musicians have left and the daylight is emerging on the horizon when a
viscous reality of confusion and decay begins to emerge little by little.
The result of so much unproductive work is a divided society, without political
discussions because opposites do not even speak. A partially gagged society,
because those who say what they think risk the puerile but incisive punishment
of agitprop and its social networks. It is that of a territory, of hardworking
and serious people, from which the headquarters of more than 5,000 companies
have fled (among them, the most important ones) and with them, little by
little, their managers and decision centers.
A place where intellectual elites have allowed them to outrage a prestige of moderation gained in centuries of coexistence with the rest of Spain, and where still from power instances superhuman efforts are made to gain international visibility, previously non-existent, with the sad objective of telling a stupefied world that we are a battered victim who has earned the natural right to protest and create conflict.
But reality imposes itself because they have sold an impossible one. Let us repeat it again: a truly democratic country cannot change its constitutional structure because 7% of its population wants it. Two million people are not enough to change the will of 47. There will be no referendum because it would be tremendously undemocratic to authorize it.
And there will not be enough international pressure (apart from the support that can be given by anti-systems and disoriented from other countries) because the international community does not want countries to secede and, especially, has no interest in Catalonia doing so, a prosperous but insignificant place for the great powers.
And we see how Brexit is doing in the United Kingdom so that nobody in their right mind still thinks that a referendum is a solution to nothing. I also believe that there will be no international noise against the sentences: an attempt to break territorial integrity from a state power is a serious crime in any country.
Many Catalans who did not participate in the party
and many repentants beg to finish it now.
We don’t want politicians in jail. That is why we want them to comply with laws and sentences, as required by the rest of the citizenry. For that we pay them. We do not want another 155, and therefore we ask that taxes be devoted to the welfare of families and not to the promotion of what will never happen.
We also want public media that are neutral as is the case in every democratic country with what is called the fourth power.
And we do not think that these great demonstrations loaded with studied symbolism are a good in themselves, nor are the official crusades against the judiciary and the monarchy.
As for the social pressure entities promoted from power, who take the streets and adopt the role of the whole society, history is full of similar examples, all of them terrible for what finally can happen when limits are not set.
Spain is a good country, although it is true that in historical terms it
leaves to be desired. It is, for example, one of the few western countries that
has had four civil wars in the last two centuries (all of them, by the way,
very Catalan).
But since 78 things have not gone wrong. According to Bloomberg, Spain has the
best health system in the world. It is the country where its citizens live the
longest (after Japan). It is a very safe country (with a few 320 homicides a
year) and more than 80 million people visit us annually. Our GDP per capita has
multiplied by six in 40 years (600%!) And we have influence in a large part of
the planet thanks to our transatlantic link.
In this next world, with its technological, economic, geopolitical and
environmental disruptions, the real opportunity is not to continue insisting on
the exhausting construction of an impossible republic, but instead to
coliderate, balance and reinforce without complexes and as soon as possible, by
and from Catalonia, to this extraordinary country called Spain.
https://www.lavanguardia.com/opinion/20190916/47375871387/fin-de-fiesta.html
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