The generation of the cherry era, the one that lived between the end of the dictatorship and the beginning of democracy, had everything to do, everything to win. Although many found the cherries scarce and short-lived, moving from the old regime to the new order entailed enormous life, professional, and social changes for a significant portion of the then-young population. Those who had been excluded from the workforce, from the administration, from everything that had to be rebuilt, came to power. Women began to be considered full legal persons. It's indecent to claim that they enjoyed better childhoods and youth than ours (not true from any point of view, not with all the nostalgia you may want), but they did have an extremely powerful driving force that those of my generation often miss: hope. Hope in the possibilities of new times and the opportunities for advancement that anyone could have (or so they said). The persistence of old practices that adapted to the new system, such as crookedness and favoritism, corruption, and nepotism of all kinds, were swept under the rug. During the liminal period of the Transition, many of the powerful of yesteryear managed to infiltrate institutions to maintain their traditional privileges. Even more so in the lucrative world of public works and the opulence of their budgets.
Our generation, let's face it, was born with one foot in the political demobilization trap, and it wasn't until the 2008 crisis hit that we realized how we had renounced being an active part of the backbone of the democracy in which we lived. Well-off parents who had gotten good jobs, often as civil servants, came to tell us that we no longer needed to fight for anything because they had done everything for us. What a way to prevent us from becoming robust citizens. In the popular culture we consumed, what was fashionable was a radical relativism that no longer trusted or believed in anything because, we were told, all ideologies had collapsed. The only way to challenge the established powers was counterculture, cynicism, liquid postmodernism, and casting suspicion on any proposal of solidity. Love was out of fashion (but at the same time, we were swallowing the hard drug of romantic comedies); running away from reality was the most sensible thing we could do, and laughing at everything, of course. "Who wants a job for life?" some of my college friends would say, belittling the older generation's desire for security. "Who wants to live in the same place forever?" And while we distracted ourselves, dreaming of the endless journey, of the possibilities offered by the airlines, low cost and new technology were paving the way for job insecurity and rising housing costs.
It was the Great Recession that brought us out of our state of civil lethargy, and for the first time, as a generation, we became actively involved in politics. Although always lacking a collective vision and under the banner of the current hegemonic value in the West: narcissism. If we look back at the leaders we've elected, whether left-wing or right-wing, who have ended in great disappointment, rotting before they matured, it's not hard to find this distinctive trait of our time in all of them. We've voted for them because they're like us: individualistic, self-referential, egocentric, more focused on image and communication than on content, more concerned with looking good in photos than with the common good. All of these are generalizations, of course, but when the magnitude of the tragedy of corruption is revealed, it's hard to avoid taking a long view, hard not to reach these conclusions.
