It cost me God and help, but yesterday I forced a vote out of my family without resorting to expeditious threats, such as hiring a DJ for Christmas lunch, in the fashion of planting an air DJ crammed into every celebration, including outdoor food fairs, craft beer binges, and other recreational forms of 21st century torture.
In short: I have done my part as a citizen. Now, I want my flat, my affordable housing, my slice of the social paradise pie. Because if anything the municipal candidates have promised this time is “housing”, like Franco in 1957, the year the Ministry of Housing was created.
From what you can see and hear from this campaign, the Spanish are a lot of houses and flats (not to be confused with the love nests of the 20th century, sponsored by company captains, high officials and bourgeois of the possible).
In the early days of democracy, parties offered jobs in industrial quantities as something sexy. Thus, candidate Felipe González promised 800,000 new jobs in 1982, a proposal received with divided opinions because of the magnitude, not because of the importance of offering jobs to those who did not have them.
Forty years later, we have progressed: why offer jobs if we can, directly, promise “affordable housing” within the reach of all Spaniards? In this way, we avoid arguments about whether these would be quality or insulting jobs and we prevent the lazy – or the very lazy – from wasting the income and in the end devoting the money intended to pay the entrance to iPhones a foot
Going from promising jobs to promising flats, grants for pens, pencil cases and notebooks for school rings or cinema sessions where retirees can have fun at moderate prices represents a big ideological change. It’s not about getting a job and trying to get a flat – or two -, it’s about letting yourself be loved by the State, which knows better than anyone what we want and what suits us. Guardianship in perpetuity.
