Politics is an art that requires combining various areas of action and thought. The macro and the micro, the local and the global, the urgent and the necessary. When I say politics, I mean, more precisely, public management. Politics, unfortunately, has the current day as its absolute priority and the next electoral call as its only horizon. We live—and we want to live—in a democracy, and our capricious right to suffrage conditions everything our managers do. Only dictators can afford the luxury of opening the focus, projecting, foreseeing, stretching time, accelerating and braking, letting things simmer, facing urgent trivialities without neglecting the great challenges that belong to a medium term that never quite materializes.God forbid I call for a dictatorship, but I would like it if, at least in Catalonia, the wisest people would think about the country we will have in twenty years' time, and for their predictions to mark a roadmap for the managers of the present. This is not only sensible, but it is already happening: we have framework agreements for the future of education that are systematically ignored (President Illa has just proposed another one). We have the 2030 Agenda and the EU's plan against climate change, which technofascism tries to discredit, something that would not be necessary, because the egoism of national governments and unforeseen circumstances are already in charge of making them shipwreck.In Catalonia, we have national plans for language, for culture, for mental health, for industry, for the knowledge society, and I don't know how many other subjects. But the chronic instability of governments, and above all the fundamental disagreement between sovereignists and autonomists (because sovereignists, rightly, believe that global challenges cannot be addressed with a Statute of Autonomy), prevents us from applying realistic recipes.
The worst thing about this presentism in political action is that it ends up spreading to the population as a whole, fueling selfishness and a 'fend for yourself' attitude. The engine of progress has always been the aspiration to see one's children prosper. That is over. And disappointment leads many people to forget about the common good.A few decades ago, when non-EU immigrants began to arrive, the feeling of hospitality and solidarity was overwhelmingly majority. Because empathy is the predominant feeling when an emergency occurs. But emergencies are, by definition, serious and short-lived episodes, situations that allow governments to ask the population to make sacrifices (such as the 2020 pandemic). Instead, immigration has become a structural issue, with no end date, because it obeys apparently unsolvable problems, such as the demographic crisis in Europe, the chronic bankruptcy of many underdeveloped countries and, very soon, the effects of the climate crisis in certain particularly vulnerable areas, such as sub-Saharan Africa.In the same way that the social contract binds us through duties, but also through rights, another type of contract, let's call it vital, should indicate to us that the sacrifices our generation makes will have a reward in the next generation. That these convulsive times will have a deadline, that someday demography will be managed in a reasonable way, while rich countries will make a joint effort, a kind of Marshall Plan, to improve living conditions in the countries from where the great migratory mass originates. And that here at home, the sacrifices will be compensated with a strengthening of the welfare state, collective security, and social and cultural cohesion.The administrations will have to make a huge effort to remember that we share a vehicle, a journey, and a destination; to prevent the principle of solidarity from being buried by the nihilism of every man for himself.
