This
so-called crisis, which would more accurately be called a
“depression” is a thousand varied things that need never have
happened.
Despite the occasional sensation that life is
just continuing on very much as before, the crisis here is certainly
the more obvious things that many of us see when we care to look:
more beggars on the streets, long queues in shoe repair shops, the
recent appearance of solitary men selling tissues or cigarette
lighters on the trains and Metro, a greater number of empty shops for
sale or rent (or replaced by cheapo-import Chinese shops) and it is
also reading more socio-political graffiti on walls.
The crisis is a
European-wide failure of institutions like the financial system and
the pathetic political response to it, but it is also a very
immediate, local phenomenon.
In the small town where I live, three
years ago there was both a bank and a restaurant – now there is
neither.
As well, there are the abstract statistics that
simply cannot put a human face to this tragedy - day after day of
grim, sullen economic news.
Three months ago, a newspaper headline
stated that “60% of Andalusian children live in poverty.”
This
sounds remote and abstract until we learn that there were children in
Catalonia who were still going to school in July just to eat lunch,
and they had to do this because it is next to impossible for their
parents to provide daily meals at home.
But the crisis is
about work too.
It is hearing that another man has lost his job, or
finding that your wife's job has been cut in half and therefore her
income has also been halved.
It is thousands of workers still lucky
enough to have a job but not being “lucky” enough to get paid for
their labour...for yet another month.
And it is the insult of
“mini-jobs” - (the underpaid mileurista
is seeming like the one who is well-off) or it is listening to people
at a café talking about the benefits of learning Chinese or German,
ahead of English.
As well, the crisis is the news media
being full of corrupt, cowardly politicians talking about everything
except what could end the crisis.
For thousands of people not in the
aptly-termed “political class”, it is a rapid or a gradual
descent into poverty – what George Orwell called “the
crust-wiping,” - that constant search for ways to save money but
still ending up unsatisfied after you eat.
On top of all this, the
crisis is that all-day sensation of being unpleasantly squeezed by
the invisible forces of debt, a permanent unconscious burden that is
carried by the unemployed and under-employed when a family has no
genuine bread-winner.
But what is it that has saved this
country from violence, riots and social disturbance on a grand scale?
The family.
The extended family, acting as helpers, carers and givers
of money, love, and as many kinds of assistance that you can think
of.
Without this blood-linked stability across Mediterranean Europe,
things would surely be even worse.
Sometimes, when I have
thought about the crisis I have been reminded of a Bob Dylan line
about how the sun starts to shine on him.
But then (in a single
phrase that could speak for millions of Europe's economic victims) he
sadly sings “but it's not like the sun that used to be.”
[A
version of the above text was first published as an opinion piece in Catalonia
Today magazine, September 2013.]
