Poor and impoverished

For reasons that are beside the point... Stop! If they are beside the point, why evoke them? The reason that does come to the case is that lately I have breakfast with my mother, in the kitchen of her house. He likes to listen to the radio on a transistor even though he has the app on his mobile. Nostalgia for interference.

One of these mornings I found her sitting listening to this: "... public policies aimed at achieving the global common good as opposed to the promotion of the general interest understood only as the addition and subtraction of particular interests". Oh my God? Left-wing? The coffee water came to a boil at the moment in which the announcer promoted "the listening of the impoverished of the earth".

The general interest is not only the addition and subtraction of particular interests

I thought that Sumar's "listening process" had gone too far and that the same people who transformed empty Spain into emptied Spain had exchanged the poor of the earth for the impoverished. At the end of the program I left doubts: it was not the gloss of an act of the Commons (or of the communists) but of a recent "document". Its author? Marina Garcés? No, the Episcopal Conference. Title? The faithful God keeps his covenant. Style? Between Heidegger and Vistalegre I.

One of the most repeated words in that writing – like the character of Don Quixote, one ends up reading even "the torn papers of the streets" – is hope. The sum of mother and hope led me to John Berger. For two interferences: The Vicereine of Barcelona dedicates an exhibition to him and Alfaguara has just published an anthology of essays: Why we look at animals.

Berger was one of those writers capable of being pessimistic without being cynical and optimistic without being naïve. In fact, to the optimism-pessimism dichotomy, he preferred hope-hopelessness. For more committed and less Manichean. In Here We See Ourselves, one of his last novels (and not his best), the narrator talks to his mother, who is dead. "Hope is a huge magnifying glass, that's why it doesn't allow you to see into the distance," she tells him. "Let's wait only for what has any chance of being achieved. Let's repair something. A little is a lot. One thing repaired can change a thousand." Faced with the skepticism of the son, who prefers revolution, he gives an example that today would not pass the micromachismo detector, but it is revealing: "That dog down there is tied with a chain too short. Change it, put a longer one. Then he will be able to reach the shadow and he will lie down and stop barking. And the silence will remind the mother of the house that she wanted to have a canary in a cage in the kitchen. And when the canary sings, it will iron more. And when he puts on his ironed shirt to work, the father's shoulders will hurt less. So when he comes home he will joke, as he used to, with the teenage daughter. And the daughter will change her mind and decide, for once, to take her boyfriend home for dinner. And again when he goes, the father will propose to the young man to go fishing together ... Who knows what can happen? Just change the chain." Amen.

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