Fifteen years ago, Francesco Piccolo wrote a light and delightful book in which he recounted "moments of unseen happiness." The smell of bread as it comes out of the oven, the moment the coffee pots turn off, finding a special stone on a walk along the sand, hands covered in oil when you can't stop eating peanuts during an aperitif, the encore of an extraordinary concert, when the person you're waiting for knocks down the corner, the ruix filling a carefree life for a few summer weeks.
But, to enjoy it, I will have to separate living from my concern for the world, for what is collective, for what affects us all and doesn't let us remember as often as I would like that there are moments of unseen happiness. To enjoy it, insults, violent proclamations, and soldiers who—as in Josep Carner's poem—need not be serious should disappear.
Far from my summer wish, I've been declaring myself knocked out for days now by the umpteenth evidence of more than possible crimes of greed on the part of the privileged who live better than the majority of society and steal, out of uncontrolled greed, what belongs to all of them, with the naivety they will never know.
I could go into the details, but I don't want to. I want to write in screaming letters that, every time there's a case of corruption in political representation positions, someone betrays our trust. Ours: I say this in the plural because I don't think I'm the only one in pain, knocked out.
Whenever someone sells out what belongs to everyone, they don't just disappoint those closest to them; they disappoint an entire society that would like to recover old speeches about ethics and public integrity. Whenever someone is swept away by infinite greed, they gravely undermine the cause we believe we share, even if that cause is as generic as the honesty of those who have presented themselves to the people on an electoral list asking for their vote.
The very idea of a common cause is cracking. The shared ideal of democrats is cracking. The democratic consent we give when, time and again, we call for people to go to the polls as a gesture of civic responsibility is cracking to its very core.
This is when the idea that humans are beyond help takes hold, or perhaps even worse: the feeling that those of us who uphold ideals and integrity—what they consider gullible—are being laughed at. It's as if the roles have been reversed, because it is public officials who should be providing assurances, not the citizenry who should be searching, in the well of hope, for a renewed will to believe in the general interest.
The reign of fate pushes us toward the most rabid individualism, and then the recruiters of unsympathetic individuals win; they will profit from the elections. Those who will profit are precisely those who delegitimize the politics of respect and hope to gain power by sucking away all the lost happiness.
Those who become corrupt not only attack their fellow party members or members of Parliament; they attack human dignity and its imperative of solidarity. They attack the very foundation of democracy.
The betrayal of the corrupt inflicts deeper wounds on those who make redistribution the basis of their political thinking. And now, sunk in disappointment, paralyzed by rage, knocked out by pain, we feel ashamed knowing that, nevertheless, we must rise up to prevent the damage inflicted from destroying everything we have built.
But we cannot remain silent when we discover that underground, when there is no public eye, language and actions give off an unbearable, fetid stench of machismo and abjuration of all sensitivity toward what, in public, are promises of equality. We cannot remain silent and accept without being turned inside out the vileness of the loss of the obligatory respect for the rules that any democratically elected official should maintain.
Koldo-Ábalos-Cerdán are especially hurtful because they went to great lengths to occupy strategic spaces from which to betray; Montoro and the 27 others who accompany him, because they have created a machine to modify laws to suit whoever pays the most. González Amador for being a millionaire made in the difficult times of the pandemic, whose morbid greed does not allow him to pay the proportional taxes for his enrichment. Miserable acts, again and again. Again and again. The judicial calendar determines that 31 cases of political corruption must be tried in the next four years.
We will raise our heads above the canvas so that we do not give up on the demand for nobility and honesty, which does not prevent us from classifying the miserable circumstances of political life as miserable circumstances; miserable circumstances that have coincided with extremely serious proclamations from the extreme right, which violate a string of constitutional rights in the streets and which demonstrate how necessary politics is. If only good politics were possible.
We recover the noble materials from which every democracy should be built in order to recover the pleasure of enjoying moments of unnoticed happiness.
