POLITICALLY CORRECT

I don’t know if I’m the only one, misters candidates (I bet I’m not), but I’m starting to be more tired of your tense campaigns that Mrs. Murphy of picking up her husband’s toasts.

This political nonsense we live in during campaign, looks like mud, and the candidates seem to believe that their possibilities are bigger depending on the amount of crap they throw at their enemies’ faces.

All that happens, while this old and quite damaged world is defrosting by its poles, evaporating in endless droughts, and shaking hurtfully begging for help with earthquakes and other atmospheric phenomena that some politicians just hear as a muffled whisper in the distance.

And when you’re trying to find a fair option to vote for it, the thing looks really difficult. And that’s because charisma has gone missing. The marriage politicians-citizens dissolves everyday more and more in a lack of respect and mutual interest, provoking the unavoidable abstention in the ballot boxes.

Because respect, gentlemen, is essential. It’s the respect for the enemy, although we don’t share ideas, beliefs, goals or points of view, what solved some apparently endless crisis. The respect that for instance, brought the “Dancing with wolves” character of Kevin Costner to join the enemy, or in the same way, the lack of respect that made him abandon his fellows. Just to mention a fictional example so that no sensitivity could be hurt.

I think what happens in that shallow and materialist world in wich we live, is that we’re confusing admiration and respect. Admiration is fast, brilliant but inconstant. That thing that fills our lives of tabloid gods seeking for their fifteen minutes of glory, most of the time without a previous work to back them up. And of course they fall down as fast as they’ve reached the top.

Instead, respect is slow but safe, and it won’t give up easily to disappointment for those small and understandable daily failures. You cannot respect what you don’t know. Respect is something that has to be earned, with effort. And obviously, if any naïf candidate would try to win their electors’ respect, would be banished fast by their own assessors. Because in this society led by the high speed, what matters is how soon you can get there, and where you’re getting to or how much it would cost looks unimportant.

Respect is a double way path., and your lack of respect for your electors make you forget one important thing. People that don’t sale themselves for a brilliant political carrier, or for fifteen minutes of glory in the tabloids, who pays religiously their taxes, they’re not silly, and in the end, they increase with their anonymous daily work the treasury where you get paid from.

I think you just forgot misters politicians, that you are those who are to the service of the electors and taxpayers, and not on the contrary. And this is like that for the whole four years of your term of office, and not a single second less, absolutely not just during campaign or when publicity looks appropriate.

And that will of service is something I cannot see. Maybe if we could bring it back, we would be able to sit down and to talk about our needs, and then boundaries or languages won’t be a problem anymore.

I’m Catalan and I know a lot of foreigners who speak Catalan as normal, which probably would surprise Spanish people. Of course when you criticize languages you always do it from a lack of respect, that is, from ignorance of their realities. Do you know anyone who criticises their own language?

Last time somebody told me: “talk to me in Christian”, my feverish screenwriter’s mind just could answer: “how, with my back turned and in Latin?

Genesis tells us that when God saw they were all one people with a single language, and then nothing they wanted would be impossible, he created different languages to mess them. First thought you have in mind is: “what a dirty trick”. Thinking twice it occurred to me that maybe what he wanted was us to get close to each other with an open mind to understand the difference.

Because in the end everyone speaks their own language, and you have to change your frequency, although you speak the same language, to talk, for instance, to a medicine doctor, an informatics technician, a teen-ager, and even to a man and a woman, although some people prefer the knives to the communication, but that is a far more complex and knotty problem.

It would be nice of you, misters candidates, that you’d go for political correction, dialogue and understanding. Here, somebody said, four years ago, that tension wasn’t good, and he seems to have forgotten. Surprisingly enough, bearing in mind that most of the electors, so seek and tired then, agreed with him.

Maybe we could deal for something to display our disappointment with your political behaviour, without invalidating the vote: leave a white handkerchief while voting, for instance. Probably if somebody made an inventory or them, the white handkerchiefs would win for absolute majority.

I’ve always wanted to believe that word is stronger than sword. But now that words become insults, guns are shouting, taking the streets and in some places even the classrooms. Won’t it be time for us to bring back the power to the words? Or you’d rather prefer the white handkerchiefs to talk?