17 april
on the absurdity of hope
We were on holidays in France, visiting the Verdon gorge. Like any other natural spectacle, the place has visitor centers, terraces, shops… the kind of things designed to happily separe tourists and their idle money. Our son was nine months old, so we were bound to the less adventurous part of the place, just there. Still a beautiful place, we were enjoying ourselves. Then a mobile begun to ring. And another, and another. I manage to hear pieces of conversations: “a plane flew in the pentagon? is that what you are saying?” That absurd image, as absurd as Mathias Rust landing in the Kremlin, but much more lethal, opened up a time of absurdity. A hard to predict one too. About a year before my wife and myself had decided to settle in Europe, in The Netherlands. When you looked at the picture of european governments, most of them were social democrats. Turning to the right, flirting with neoliberals, of course. Yet a mild and reasonably left was running Europe at the time.
Millions and millions of syrian refugees in tents at the border in Turkey? bad science fiction.
The radicalization of a whole second generation? unthinkable.
Bombs, machine guns, knifes and trucks as mass killing tools? not in our cities.
Normalization and election of racist and ultra-nationalist politicians? never again.
My wife and me settled in Europe. With great pleasure. We were here when the internet bubble broke and we were still here when the markets collapsed in 2008. The macroeconomy of Europe looks worse than ever, yet the economy of the european citizen has suffer nothing compared with the economy of anybody else through these crisis in any other country. The social services of Europe made all these crisis bearable. From the distance I have seen how the country that saved my family from a genocide, Venezuela, slowly devolved into the medieval age, lead by a government that calling itself revolutionary, is a badly organized but lethal mafia.
Yet in Europe we got Brevik, butchering teenagers because they were social democrats. We got people on the street telling us that a vaccine that cures a pandemic virus is comparable with having a yellow star placed on your shoulder. The United Kingdom abandoned the European Union. A second generation Le Pen is still winning votes, in Spain Franco is still worshipped and in The Netherlands the government that condone the biggest european case of institutional racism in history was practically re-elected.
This picture does not make sense. Not a bit.
And yet, a North American president has seen the immense nonsense and will retire the troops that went there, after that day when I was in the gorges of Verdon. Do we get the right to hope that an age has come to an end and we could start something else?