Juan Soto Ivars – 12/01/2020
When I arrived in Barcelona in 2010, social politicization amazed me more than anything else. Regarding what I had seen in Madrid, this seemed to me a more tense and less carefree place. The rookies were immediately impressed by the ‘estelades’ (independentist flags) of the balconies because he was not used to people needing to go around the world with an ideological badge. At a dinner with people who spoke of the capital as a fascist city, it occurred to me to try break a spear for it and I noticed that one had to be careful. They immediately considered that defending a city was praising a way of doing politics: I don’t talk about politics (I told them)!
But with those people there was no way to avoid politics. The same thing happened with a lot of subjects. With them you couldn’t talk about school, trains, movies, music, history or love without talking about politics. I noticed that here the people was political and the political was taken in a very personal way. In addition, I further discovered that there were many people who refused to talk about many issues because they didn’t want to get bogged down talking about politics. And this got worse when Artur Mas (former Catalan PM) got scared by the 15-M movement and the process ‘procés’ was invented.
From that moment on, talking about real politics, health or social rights, became almost impossible because the lamp genius had invented a method to politicize everything … except politics.
A decade later
At that time, a trip to Murcia to see the family or to Madrid to see friends meant noticing the difference and getting their feet, broken from riding on politicized cobblestones, in warm salt water.
But the process ‘procés’ showed that it was not happy with his small borders. Throughout this decade, the flags I saw as badges on the balconies of Barcelona sprouted like mildew throughout Spain.
One day I went to Madrid and ended up discussing politics with people who a few months before I didn’t even know what I was thinking, and in Murcia I met two friends who didn’t talk to each other because one had joined Vox.
They started calling me equidistant, as if not being exalted portrayed you and your place in the world was a seat of Parliament.
My friends began to call each other: fascists, dirties, communists, extremists, stinky person (cuñado), bigshots, feminist-nazis (feminazis), bloody catalaniards, shitty people (ñordos), separatist-rats (separratas), and the ruptures came accordingly.
Today I find it difficult to elaborate a complete list of the people I know who have stopped talking each other because of these things, which leads me to think that row-politics is not a struggle between worldviews, but a game in which deputies vampirize their citizenship and divide it to take advantage of it.
What I noticed when I arrived in Barcelona is happening everywhere in Spain. Everything is politics except politics. I do not know what passions will ignite in you what you have just read, but I can only tell you one thing: if your idea about how to improve the world has led you to lose friends, it seems to me that you are the least indicated person to solve things.
Add comment