I tend to be an optimist and I don't get sad easily, but as a native of Barcelona and always practicing, I am seriously worried.for the fragile situation of my cityand the dangerous drift that its course is taking.
I can only come to understand that the Barcelona of old was an overflowing city in which everything was oversized, since the waves of tourists in search of beauty, climate, quality of life, architecture and Gaudí caused a fierce growth of the hotel offer.and the voracity of maritime cruises burst the city with fleeting visitors. If we add to all this air transport at bargain prices we will have the perfect complement for the general collapse.
Since the 19th century, Barcelona was a quiet, elegant and cosmopolitan city in which, despite the poverty of the immigration suburbs and industrial belt, people enjoyed its elegance and the culture of its institutions and organizational structures, circles, clubs and high schools.
But behold, the appearance at the time ofthree exterminating dragonsThey have not only destroyed the oversize but have ruthlessly destroyed everything good and calm that Barcelona had. Let's see:
Covid, that virus imported without permission, caught the country off guard, the drama of death in solitude and the total kidnapping and confinement of the population, has not only shown our weakness, the deficient government of Spain and the fragile health structures in material and professional resources, butIn the case of Barcelona it has also destroyed the tourist structure, commercial and hospitality on which we citizens had mistakenly based our star and splendor. Large port and airport superstructures paralyzed,hundreds of hotels and restaurants closedand thousands of empty and deserted terraces with the only company of many thousands of lowered blinds from small family businesses.
But, in recent years, Barcelona has suffered from a municipal government resulting from a catastrophic democratic error with the most undocumented team in its history, with a set of openly anti-system and populist parties that is full of characters whose only value is having been lucky enough tohaving gotten there without hitting the water in his life.
Such a team is led by Mrs. Colau, known as thequeen of the escracheto which Barcelona handed the baton of command without having any idea of the treasure that was placed in its hands and that years later the population remains horrified at how so many things can be destroyed in such a short time, at how elegance and class drags itself through the puddles of filth that marginality brings, how much history and culture is handed over to the paws of the tacky vulgarity, festivals and traditions at the service of the insult and bad taste of the so-called artists of the grotesque.
A non-existent urban planning and city project due to political incompetence in decision-making, which is why it is worth askingWhat guidelines can an illiterate government inspire?And how can you then entrust something brilliant to a team of technicians who have fled in terror or remain hidden?
Well, if Mayor Colau leads that municipal band,What can Barcelona expect more than mediocrity and ostracism?, violence, drug addiction, marginality and urban occupation. And so it is, that second dragon burns Barcelona, because of the incompetent characters who have gone from the street to the throne without even having known any intermediate transit station, with which we have only managed to fill our palace with filth.
Sad scenario for draconian voracity, although the third dragon, the oldest and most harmful, has been breathing fire and spreading poison for a decade now in all sectors of the Catalan population. And his figure and his evil are also recognizedwith the name ofprocess, feeding its rot with a false will of a people that has only usurped the peaceful coexistence of the citizens of Catalonia.
For decades in the hands of corrupt and criminal clans (Dixit Prosecutor's Office) and in recent times in the face of scandals with the diversion of huge amounts of public money for the illegal financing of parties, institutions and people.With 3% as a banner, the dragon must mutate to new contagious evils such as the right to decide, cheating referendumsand a suicidal secessionism that lacks muscle and majorities. A meager and false superiority in the composition of the Parliamentproduct of an unfair law that poorly distributes territorial votes, offers a mirror in which reality is deformed until it reflects a set of idiots who act based on an authority they do not have. You just have to observe the surreal scene of presenting as icons those responsible for all the chaos in prison or escaped abroad, or those who are left scrambling for a chair or a refuge where they can bury their responsibilities for having been committing an authentic cultural genocide that one day history will have to address.
The question that every Barcelonan, Catalan, Spanish and European must ask themselves is: Will the city of Barcelona be able to survive Covid, Mrs. Colau and the dramatic process? Will it have sufficient foundation in the richness of its own history or in its battered culture today if it also manages to awaken a new bourgeoisie?
And will we Catalans be able to take flight without complexes,neither divisions nor sick states of enlightenmentand hate that we should lock up in the corners of oblivion?
I cannot finish without the usual optimism emerging in me and I believe I can affirm that we will survive the dragons Covid, Colau and processes, even knowing that in the future nothing will be the same as before, but the Mediterranean will continue to caress our skin, the sun will give us the southern heat, we will recover our historical elegance and culture and,to Gaudí, Pla, Dalí andAll those who left will walk among us again.Despite any catastrophe, Barcelona will survive.
https://cronicaglobal.elespanol.com/pensamiento/sobrevivira-barcelona_413649_102.html
Mariano Gomà