As timely as a birthday present, the High Court of Justice (TSJC) had the courtesy to coincide the national holiday with the announcement of the repeal of a large part of the decree that sought to protect Catalan in the classroom.
Spain continues to have the same old plan for Catalonia: make it pay and shut up. Above all, make it pay. I write "Spain" because when funding doesn't improve and the Spanish government itself admits that Cercanías is the worst service of everyone due to decades of disinvestment, when 33 years after the Madrid-Seville high-speed train, the Valencia-Barcelona line has still not been completed, and when Catalan in schools must play cat and mouse with the courts, we are talking about a structural form of exercising power in Catalonia, regardless of who governs there or here. This is exactly what Spanish political, economic, and cultural culture understands by Spain: only Castilian is Spanish, Madrid is the center, and the rest are peripheries.
This does not mean that we do not have strengths or room for gain (in fact, they pay special attention to what they perceive as a threat, such as 20% of GDP, 25% of exports, and Barcelona's universality), but Spain's constant problematization of our existence and interests ends up affecting our self-esteem and, every day, our self-worth. Spain extends to us the invitation to think how much easier life would be for us if we didn't have the Catalan obsession.
Today it's the language, and tomorrow it'll be something else. It doesn't matter that the current Catalan government talks about normalization every day and sees itself as a form of autonomy that respects the law the most. Under these conditions, independence still makes perfect sense. The problem is that it hasn't had, doesn't have, and doesn't seem to have the logistics.
