Originally published in Spanish. Ignacio Vidal-Folch. The Objective
While we are busy with our trifles, real life goes past. Then, as the years go by, we look back and say: “How could we be so thoughtless! How could we be so blind!” Now, while Galicia and Portugal burst into flames, deepening the ecological disaster and the desertification of the territory, with a dynamic that we should have addressed decades ago with a serious public debate, with a genuine state policy… we are very busy handling the secessionism toy in the other end of the national periphery.
The French young of the sixties, probably the most restless, informed, intellectualized generation in History, the one which oriented their attention antennas to remote political phenomena, felt that the formidable prosperity in which they lived —never seen until then, which probably we will never achieve again— was in fact a prison, so it embraced nothing less than the Maoist ideal. No to De Gaulle, yes to the Chinese communism’s Cultural Revolution. Those youngsters so well-read and cultivated; those youngsters so libertarian read —seriously— the little red book by Mao and reflected on its stupid statements.
So, when such cultivated generation skidded so much, and had so childish mottos —unacceptable for a political subject— as “Be realistic, demand the impossible!”, why would we be surprised that in a Spanish autonomous region, one of the most flourish and free in the world, masses of dumbs rise in clamour to claim —to demand—, crammed in yellow t-shirts, the democracy they are already enjoying and the freedom they already have in surplus?
The revolutions of the rich have this whimsical point of the delusional narcissism. Then, years go by, but not the shame; as the flames go by the woods and leave the landscape carbonised.
