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The Pangloss parenthesis

2021-07-03T17:45:43.429Z


We are so happy that we often have to turn to problems from the past - the present offers a meager supply


Some people contemplate some of the photographs of the exhibition "Land of dreams. Cristina García Rodero" in San Sebastián, on October 13, 2020. Gorka Estrada / EFE

This morning I was looking at some photographs of Cristina García Rodero, an exceptional photographer who, perhaps because she is not very aware of current events, captures reality like few artists.

They were images of the Spain of before.

Not long before: I got to know that lean and monochromatic Spain that, under the reveries of the dictatorship and the revelries of the gentlemen, lived attached to the day to day and to concrete events.

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Today we do not care much about the lives of our grandparents and great-grandparents. But what lives those. The wars of Cuba and the Philippines and the end of the empire. The war in Morocco (in which Alfonso XIII was a very prominent commissioner: there are traditions that endure) and the end of the empire's residues. The dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. The II Republic. The socialist insurrection. The military coup and the Civil War. The Franco dictatorship. Rationing and autarky. Add to this currency changes, financial losses, famines, riots, massacres.

If one reviews the recent history of Spain (or that of France, or that of Germany, each with its own style) and compares it with the present, one feels something akin to vertigo.

The individuals of my time, the so-called

boomers

, have enjoyed unusually benign times.

Our life has been quite calm and predictable.

Peace, good health care, pensions, travel and vacations.

We have enjoyed, and still enjoy, a kind of parenthesis from Pangloss: our little world has been almost the best of all possible worlds.

Like the philosopher in Voltaire's novel, we have come to believe that it all makes sense.

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The pandemic will pass as a fit of hiccups. For many, it has already passed. We came out neither better nor worse. We are the same, and the complaints about the serious humanitarian crisis in the hotels of Mallorca show that we are there. Unable to tolerate the slightest frustration. Parents and children embraced in the same fantasy. What right does reality have to disturb our existence?

Pablo Casado persists in raving aloud. Toni Cantó will promote the use of Spanish in Madrid, which is about time. Half of the Catalan population is bitter (within comfortable limits) because Catalonia is not independent; the other half is bitter (without boasting) because their political and social weight has been reduced to almost nothing. We are distressed by languages ​​and flags. We are so happy that we often have to turn to the problems of the past because the present is in short supply.

How beautiful, this inertia of ours.

Not even young people, already aware that their life will be less predictable and more agitated (I am not saying worse, I am saying different) than that of their parents, are capable of escaping the paradigm of parentheses.

Climate change, against which we do nothing because why complicate our existence, and massive migrations, regardless of what we cannot yet imagine, will return us to the din of history.

Not to my generation, a monument to selfishness and unconsciousness, but to others.

I think that, in a few decades, today's young people will have a look like the ones Cristina García Rodero photographed: a gaze fixed on real things and not necessarily comfortable.


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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-07-03

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