1. Since life flies by, we have already celebrated fifty Diades in democracy and have heard nearly forty televised messages from the President of the Generalitat. The commemoration of September 11th this year, however, will not go down in history. Neither will Salvador Illa’s speech. In line with a government infused with a presidential tone, it was six minutes of low-profile arguments, filled with good intentions, logical doses of common sense, a practiced emptiness, and that’s about it. If I had to pick just one sentence from everything Illa said, I would be clear: “No one is more Catalan than anyone else.” It made me think. Is it true that no one is more Catalan than anyone else? Does it not matter where we come from? Does it not depend on the right, or the left? Nor on religion or integration? Does it not depend on the flags we hang (or no longer hang) on the balcony? Nor on the language we speak? Nor on the goals we celebrate in the street? Nor on whether we know, or not, who Mossèn Cinto was? Nor on whether we have TV3 tuned in? Or if there is no need to have it on the remote because there is 30% of Catalans (who are no less Catalan than anyone else) who never watch it, on principle. Put another way, and to continue with the simile, “no one is more Spanish than anyone else”? To be from a place, beyond just being attended to in any public hospital, perhaps you have to feel like you are from there. This would be a possible criterion. Everyone can answer this question that has arisen from Salvador Illa’s statement.
2. The president’s messages of collective confidence fit well with his temperament of eating little and digesting well, but they do not align with the summer we have lived through. They hid from us that Catalonia had been excluded from the PISA report due to an unusual blunder, and we began the school year with a teachers' strike that the Government did not know how to resolve while students were on a three-month vacation. They did not even know how to organize a return operation, at least in an orderly fashion, on the night of the total eclipse. They did not warn about the torrential rains in El Vendrell which, in addition to the death of two women, put the lives of a hundred people in a nightclub and many more at a campsite at risk. Weeks later, there was a scramble with a mistaken ES-Alert, which did not accurately predict the regions, the timing of the rains, nor the intensity of the storm. A preventive patch by Minister Parlón that could not cover up another failure: the resignation of Trapero as director of the Mossos. Collserola, meanwhile, remains closed due to an African swine fever that has dragged on throughout the year and which, at this rate, will destroy the businesses in the area before it finishes off the gatherings of wild boars. Shall we continue? Shall we talk about the permanent mess of dependency aid, which actress Assumpta Serna has denounced?
3. And we arrive at the heart of the matter: the language. During the week of the Diada, Plataforma per la Llengua came out to denounce the mockery that the National Pact for the Language is turning out to be. A year and a half after its implementation, only 38% of the planned measures have been executed. We complain that the investments the State is supposed to make in Catalonia, in infrastructure, for example, always result in a much lower percentage than what was budgeted, but it turns out that when it only depends on us, we also do not launch everything that was planned for a nuclear issue such as the social use of Catalan. The National Pact for the Language cannot remain the umpteenth makeup operation of the government of the day. It is infuriating, because a lot of work went into this Pact, the diagnosis was accurate, and, for once, there was a budget to do many things. So far, few have been done, the project has lost momentum, and Catalan is where it was. Or worse, because the months go by and all those Catalans who are as Catalan as the best of them neither use it, nor have any desire to, nor any need. And time passes, and pronouns are lost.
