And where were you?

BarcelonaThere are generations who remember where they were when man set foot on the moon, when JFK was killed, when television arrived, or when they had access to the first computer and the first cell phone. Our parents and grandparents remembered above all when the war that marked them broke out and when the dictator died. All of us alive today will remember where we were when the government decided that the collective interest recommended staying isolated at home and what we did during the lockdown due to the COVID pandemic.

Those days saw the best and the worst of all of us. We saw how many people chewed on their own fear and went to work in hospitals, supermarkets, nursing homes, and funeral homes. We saw how the workers in some nursing homes stayed with the elderly to avoid infection and how some left their children in the care of family members to care for our parents. But we also sensed what we know today: speculators took advantage of the confusion to strike it rich and buy that Madrid penthouse or yet another property. We sensed how so many people were dying of suffocation and alone without any palliatives.

We saw how protective suits were improvised with garbage bags, how cleaning ladies and supermarket cashiers kept their cool, how morgues were improvised, how herbs, plants, and animals reclaimed cities. We also saw how some privileged families went to the sea or the mountains to experience a break they still remember today as a bubble of well-being. Some companies learned to leap forward and digitalized at a pace they would never have dreamed of, but many others disappeared. Many learned to work from home amid the noise of children and the pot on the stove. For journalists, these were also strange times. This newsroom emptied two days before the lockdown, aware of what China and Italy had been telling us for weeks. We learned to remotely complete the entire process of getting a newspaper out, even the final step of sending it to print. Three people were never absent, turning their presence in the newsroom into an act of desperate resistance. They coordinated the efforts of everything else, which soon required leaving home to report. Journalists were part of the news subject, something that doesn't usually happen, and we observed our own fear: the deaths of our loved ones, the lack of protective equipment and respirators, the loneliness of the elderly, the anguish for our children, the fight for the vaccine, the spread of mental illness and the isolation of adolescents, the adolescent mass, the mass.

For journalism, it was a good time. Citizens wanted to know what was happening and also needed to be entertained. News was consumed through digital channels and in record time. Our priority was to maintain contact with readers by informing them with precision and in-depth information about a crisis that not only changed the ways we work but also reshaped political and social dynamics around the world. The lockdown exposed structural inequalities in access to technology and access to quality education. Through constructive journalism, the goal was to show that, despite the uncertainty, there was a way to transform this crisis into an opportunity for renewal and restructuring of public policies and the press into a benchmark for critical analysis and a space for debate for Catalan society.

What did we learn?

Five years later, we are beginning to be able as a society to overcome the trauma and consider which side of society we want to be as individuals. Do we want to stand alongside those who overcome obstacles and thrive through difficulties? If the response as a society is positive, we have the opportunity to learn some lessons. If we moved forward, it was thanks to scientific cooperation and research, to collective work, to trust in science and not the flat-earth ideology that governs the world's leading power today, to cooperation between the countries of the European Union. In economic intervention to balance the market when it fails, and in policies aimed at protecting social cohesion when everything comes to a standstill. In the United States, the pendulum is now far from what we learned. In Europe, it is not yet. It will depend on all of us to have learned some lessons from one of the critical moments we will have experienced throughout our lives.