There was a distant time when when travelers from Madrid arrived in Barcelona, they talked non-stop about the civility of our traffic. Of your respect for the rules. While there they had to protect the bus lanes with cones and other devices to prevent the colonization of cars, here a few stripes of paint were enough. But all this has changed, so much so that now the law of the strongest has invaded the territory of the weakest, the ecological citizen who walks, the elderly, the woman with the stroller, the couple who walks.
But there is no silver lining, because when I get up every morning and confidently go out into the street to join my fellow citizens, walkers on the sidewalks, of what was once a great city, I feel safe.
Now I realize the extraordinary service that the long years of practicing judo, karate, kendo, and especially jiu-jitsu have provided me. All of this gives me the ability to walk on the wild sidewalks of Barcelona. I thank Colau because he has reborn in me the need for survival, and thus maintain an hour of training six days a week. It is the only possibility to walk on our sidewalks and survive, because only the law of the ferocious ORI prevails in them, the identified, harmful and treacherous rolling objects, which always fall on the weakest, the slowest. It has also helped me train my peripheral vision, because cyclists and electric skaters tend to attack from the sides, and to develop hearing to prevent boarding from behind. Some basic techniques have been vital to me, and most of all tai sabaki, which allows you to quickly and economically move away from the path of the flying device that your body seeks.
Thanks to the wild sidewalks of Barcelona that Colau provides us, we are in shape, at a high cost, of course. And woe to you if you are not!, because all order and authority has disappeared from our sidewalks. The Urban Guard, which we are told every year is being reinforced, is a species at risk of extinction and deserves to be protected.
But there is more and worse, it is not just our streets that have become wild, it is the city, its leisure places. There is a much broader, more tragic reality that has multiplied in recent years and that does not accept ironies of any kind.
Our city is cruelly savage because every day a rape occurs; actually in statistical terms a little more than one. One sexual abuse with penetration per day, 192 cases in six months, 32 per month. The rate per 100,000 inhabitants of this crime is 11.5. Madrid, to place another large city, has a figure three times lower, 3.58. How can it be? In the capital of the champion of gender feminism, the one that establishes centers for new masculinities, the one that saturates us with speeches, advertisements, subsidies and campaigns against machismo; Right now it has another one underway to celebrate the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women for a week. What a travesty of celebration in the rape capital! While reality pursues women, Colau pays with our taxes for events, shows, workshops, and distributes prizes against machismo. They lack stage shame.
And violence is growing in the city. 16 homicides in the first six months of the year, for only 14 Madrid with double the population. Their respective rates per 100,000 inhabitants are 0.96 versus 0.4. And violent robberies, the worst due to the damage and fear they cause, are three quarters of the same. There were 7,965, during that period of time. 1,327 per month, 44 each day; almost two an hour. This represents an index per 100,000 inhabitants of 478.6, far from the Madrid rate of 168.5.
What has happened to Barcelona to reach this point? What have you done to him, Ada Colau? Give us an explanation of why all this is happening. Don't run away hidden between campaigns and subsidies. Let's face it: we live under a dangerous problem. Those who govern the city do not know what to do for a fundamental reason, because they cannot recognize that it is their ideology and the culture that they have promoted with the help of others, much more, that has unleashed the climate that fosters so much mischief.
The question is where it is and who promotes the culture and politics that must regenerate Barcelona.
Josep Miró and Ardèvol