October 1st: neither forgetting of what, nor forgiveness of whom?

Podem announced this morning that tomorrow it will vote in favor of the two housing decrees, in line with what the Tenants' Union had requested. With Podem's yes, it remains to be seen how Junts and the PNB will vote.

The details of the decrees contain new features such as the fact that the owners will have to compensate the tenants with a minimum of twelve monthly payments if they do not renew their contract.

At this moment the debate is political (who will vote for what?), legal (do the decrees lead to legal uncertainty?), economic (will the rental market collapse?) and social (what real effects will it have?).

Meanwhile, today is October 1st and it has been nine years since the referendum.

And precisely today the trial ends for the national police officers who left Roger Español blind in one eye, the only ones who have gone to trial for the charges, kicks and baton blows of that day, because the rest have been granted amnesty. Nine years later, President Puigdemont remains in exile, although it seems for not much longer. Just yesterday a lawyer close to the president told me that they were deciding the strategy for his return, because it is one thing for the Constitutional Court to declare it legal for all purposes -which will happen next Tuesday (today, the president of the TC, Conde-Pumpido, said they will be clear in their ruling so that the Supreme Court has no choice but to archive the case)- and another is the time it will take for the Supreme Court to archive the case and for Judge Llarena to lift the arrest warrant.

October 1st is recent enough to be a memory that still conditions the present. For a long time, this "October 1st" was followed by "no forgetting, no forgiving", no forgiving the State. Nine years later, the forgetting part remains the same (we have not forgotten), but the forgiving part no longer refers only to the State. There are those who do not forgive Puigdemont or Junqueras, regardless of the exile and prison they have endured, as the main ones responsible for not having reached the end, or for not having anything else prepared beyond October 1st. Nor do they forgive Esquerra, Junts and the CUP, and the ANC and Òmnium, for their endless divisions that made everyone bored of it all. In these nine years, among the more than two million people who went to vote, there are many who have gotten off at some station along the way and who, without ceasing to be pro-independence, have either left it for the next generation or have embraced the intention of voting for Aliança Catalana. Thus, October 1st is today a day of pride but also the beginning of a lost opportunity. Another one. And this only generates resentment and divisions, because there are always those who are purer.

In biographical terms, it may well be so. In historical terms, if we make an abstraction that presentism prevents, that three centuries after 1714, and with all the attacks that this country has endured, often defenseless, more than two million Catalans wanted to decide their future and affirmed themselves in terms of independence is extraordinary. Salvador Cardús writes today that the same irreverence that has saved us defensively and subversively throughout the centuries, was a burden at the time of emancipation, and he says that “in a strategy to do it again, in addition to better anticipating the brutality of the adversary and one's own cowardice, above all it would be necessary to better prepare the nation to move from resistant irreverence to an audacious, irreducible, and above all constructive cultural disposition, capable of assuming the inconveniences and institutionalizing costs inherent in the exercise of power”. Because today it is clear that the State felt so threatened by secession that it would have been willing to kill, but here no one, or very few, were willing to die.

Good morning.