A handout from Vox arrives at a pro-independence chat. A school classroom with the symbol of the crescent moon and the star above the blackboard. “The Parliament of Catalonia supports an agreement with the Arab League to promote Arabic in schools, with the only opposition from Vox”. In the chat, a civil servant, mother of a large family, and who has gone from voting ERC to CUP and lately to Junts, writes: “My mother… not a single euro for pedagogues, teachers of maths, Catalan, etc. and yes for Arabic teachers. Let’s vote for Aliança Catalana, to see if they present themselves to the Gene”.
While Aliança Catalana plucks the daisy and waits for an injection of funds, Vox is running its campaign. The agenda, slogans and anxieties of the Spanish far-right, no matter how much they weigh on each other, coincide with those of pro-independence extremism, changing Spain for Catalonia. There is nothing more like a nationalist than another nationalist. In the chat environment, the expression “we’ll end up like the Sioux” has been used for years.
Last week, interviewed by this newspaper, Eduardo Mendoza said: “The people of Barcelona are like the Indians of a reservation and all the other things are already colonization. And I like it that way, it seems to me a good way to renew”. The writer embodies cosmopolitanism, but the majority of Barcelona residents have not lived in New York or London, nor do they see the joy in colonization.
Some of these Barcelona residents already visit their grandchildren in the extra-radius, because their children do not have a roof in Barcelona, ??which residents with foreign salaries do have access to. They go to saturated CAPs and from now on they will have to keep an eye on the tap while for months the tourists (especially the luxury ones) have consumed up to five times more water than them.
These people, the pro-independence official and Vox voters, played Indians and cowboys as children. And as usual, they often fought with their friends to embody the first, most peculiar and colorful. Until, as adults, they understood the fate of the Native Americans. Today they are filled with fear when changes that they do not understand happen in their environment at a dizzying speed.
Then they put romanticism aside, assume that it is better to be a cowboy and that others are Indians. And while they see that their grievance is not heeded, but despised and ridiculed, they channel the fund of common sense and justice they have in their concerns by supporting extreme political formations that will not solve their problems, but comfort them with their propaganda
Between those who fear ending up like the Sioux and the cosmopolitan vision of a thin but influential and often powerful social layer – not our writer, of course – there are thousands of people looking for a home to stop being some outcasts The tension between these three vectors marks our time more than at any other time in history. Daily politicking, however, prevents it from being given the attention it deserves. And this is not a pity, but a mistake.
