Level Ground, 37 & 38. Is This Liberty?

Instead of writing every day, it seems I'm slowing down and writing every two days. It's just another measure of how inured we have become to the pandemic, I think. It's become just another part of life.

The national state of alarm ended this past Sunday. No more curfews, and no regions closed off, to our disgrace. Why? Because in many cities and large towns, it was as if people equaled the end of the state of alarm with the end of the pandemic.

Crowds, and crowds, and crowds of young people, in general, out on the streets, all jumbled together, singing, laughing, shouting, drinking, and dancing. Scenes from Madrid, Barcelona, and even Salamanca looked like it was the local saint's day and a festivity. Fifth wave, here we come.

Ayuso, who spoke so much of liberty, and keeping Madrid open, has turned her back on all the doctors, nurses, and health care workers who worked to extenuation to save every Covid patient that came (and still come) before them. Liberty to die from Covid and its complications is what she advocated. Those ignorant young people seem to forget that their parents aren't vaccinated, yet, and that they can still die or suffer from complications for the rest of their lives. I can only hope these ignorants will not leave their cities to spread contagion elsewhere. 

This is the result of a generation of the neoliberal conservatives maintaining that individual freedom is the most important thing on this planet. Of expressing the belief that anyone, who maintains that each of us has a responsibility with our neighbor, is a "Red" communist who will come for your house, and strip you of your ability to live the way you want. 

What is freedom? There are many answers to that question, some more correct than others, but being able to drink yourself into a coma during a pandemic because you are finally allowed out all night is not one of them. Julio Anguita was the Secretary General of the Spanish Communist Party, and coordinator of the political party into which it was integrated in the 1990's, Izquierda Unida (United Left). When he was diagnosed with a cardiac problem at the beginning of this century, he resigned and returned to his job as a history teacher, giving up all the pay that went with his having sat in the Congreso. He still gave talks, though, and was giving one when he received the news that his journalist son, Julio, was killed in the Iraq war. One of his most famous sayings came then, "Malditas sean las guerras y los canallas que las hacen." (May wars and the bastards who wage them be damned.) He died of a heart attack in May of last year.

I don't agree with Julio Anguita's politics; I am not communist. But he would say some truths from time to time that made one think. One of these is how he defined freedom. A video of him defining it during a talk thirty years ago started making the rounds when the Madrid election mud-slinging came into being, with Ayuso declaring she was the paladin of liberty against the evil of communism. In the video he mentions that freedom is not freedom of conscience, but free conscience, to be able to decide if one is informed enough to make a decision. 

To have a free conscience, one must be well informed, be able to eat every day, have clothes to wear, a roof over one's head. Once one's most basic needs are met, one can begin to think, to be a free person. "Si yo tengo que buscar el trabajo trampeando como sea, vendiéndome por cuatro perras porque tengo que comer, los míos y yo, yo no soy un hombre libre aunque mañana me permitan que vaya a votar en las urnas."  (If I have to find a job, cheating in any way, selling myself for four bucks because I have to eat, me and mine, I am not a free man even if tomorrow they allow me to vote in the ballot box.)

That is true liberty, the freedom from need, and the freedom to be able to think to make an informed decision without spending time and energy exclusively on survival. But, of course, some small-souled people would rather see it as being able to get drunk whenever they feel like it, no matter what the circumstances. And so goes the country.

Life continues.