You will not live worse than your parents

A father takes his daughters to school in Madrid.

SAMUEL SÁNCHEZ

Unless the mantra repeated ad nauseam is a self-fulfilling prophecy, we will not live worse than our parents. In fact, we have already lived much better than them: their effort and sacrifice have allowed us to escape to childhood in the misery that they had. Thanks to them we have enjoyed an education unthinkable in the past if we did not belong to a family with potentials. We may not get to live as well as we hoped, but that is something very different from living worse. They neither had children in the best conditions nor was their life a bed of roses. In addition, the future is not written, it is not a cliché to affirm that it depends on us. At least if there is a minimum conviction that we live in a democratic order, we cannot resign ourselves.Hope may seem naive but we have no choice if we do not want to give up deciding for ourselves what present we want, what other living conditions we need.

I, like so many children of the working class, will not live worse than my father, who left his back at the construction site carrying sacks ten hours a day. Today's women, no matter how bad things go, we will not live worse than yesterday's women: we can vote, open a checking account without anyone's permission, study a career, work, decide if we have children or not, report our abusers without being asked at the police station what we have done to make them beat us. Only the lack of memory can lead us to believe that they lived a happy world of quiet maternity wards and a home smelling of freshly baked muffins. Only the prevailing Adamism and

generation can settle in stagnant and sterile complaint.

The precariousness of the world of work, unemployment and shameful wages are facts that affect us directly but they are neither a biblical curse nor a fatal destiny. They are the result of concrete political decisions that have been taken in recent decades: union demobilization, labor reforms that have led to cuts in rights and outsourcing of services that turn even those generated from the public into garbage jobs. No, let's not settle, let's not resign ourselves and ask them to give us back what cost previous generations sweat and tears and a lifetime of struggle. That is our legitimate heritage and not discouragement.