I write these lines closing my eyes at times and always from the stomach, you know, that border that adjoins the heart. I can’t stop comparing the failed rescue of the ‘Titan’ millionaires with the one that ended this Wednesday with 37 blacks dead off the Canary coast and after twelve hours without any intervention.
In one case, four ships, ten helicopters, an underwater robot, two planes from Canada… And all the media attention in the world in the Atlantic. A movie script story about five rich eccentrics who got into a luxury sardine can on the whim of observing the remains of the ‘Titanic’. We know everything about them. We wanted to know everything. Instead of the nameless crowded into an inflatable boat, nothing at all.
The sea swallowed those Nobody: there were no tickets bought, no relatives asking for them, no politicians waiting to help them in the ports, in the town halls, in the institutions, in Congress, in the Eurochamber… One thinks that, After all, the only thing that would make those in charge uncomfortable is if the sea took revenge some hot day in August and returned the corpses, washed away by the currents, to a beach full of children playing in the sand.
Here, in our country, desperate men, women and children want to enter, willing to die in any way to fulfill a dream that only they see. I don’t know why I’m not surprised that not even Tato comes to help those blacks who try to get to the door of the house. Why welcome them if they are foreigners, as well as starving? Ah, I understand: “the Spanish, first”.
Today marks one year since the assault on the Melilla fence and this has been one of the busiest weeks in terms of the arrival of small boats along the dangerous Canary Islands route. But we are overwhelmed by the evidence that there are no signs of humanity, neither with the dead nor with the living. Tragedies are forgotten so quickly that it is better for the tide to sway the castaways to and fro. It does not even cause a scandal that Spain and Morocco played dice for the lives of 61 anonymous people for twelve hours knowing that the boat was sinking. So let’s draw a thick veil, Sánchez, Marlaska, Feijóo, everyone. It is not going to be that Spain is unstitching on the edge.
I suspect that the demand for responsibilities will only be responded to with the usual exercise of hypocrisy. Perhaps it is that we all carry a Salvini, a Trump, an Abascal, inside. At worst, it is only a matter of time before it manifests itself outside.
