When you need heroes

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I never believed in the applause at eight o'clock every afternoon. I tried to avoid the moment by occupying myself with anything; By taking out the trash, for example, he avoided being subject to censorship. It is always difficult to deviate from the enthusiastic behavior of the group, especially in difficult moments for the community when it is common to indulge in dramatic gestures and the cultivation of the most exaggerated symbolism. On the balconies of the street of my confinement, at that time one could always hear Manolo Escobar's "Long live Spain" after the usual "I will resist" that culminated with various shouts of "Long live Spain" and the waving of the occasional little national flag. . We were supposed to applaud our heroes, those who were "on the front lines fighting the coronavirus.



Drama with warlike connotations that I was incapable of making my own. I could not help but perceive this communal act repeated afternoon after afternoon as the gesture of monumental cynicism. A couple of weeks before the declaration of the state of alarm and the consequent start of confinement, a rally was called for a Sunday AOL Email List morning in defense of public health, which has been in the process of increasing depletion of resources for more than a decade. Those " heroes " whom we applauded in the midst of the epidemic crisis had long been working in conditions of continued deterioration, subject to regrettable hardship and treated at work like any precarious worker.







At that rally I attended in the city where I live, only a couple of hundred people gathered. Santiago Ramón y Cajal was one of those officials, in this case from science, turned into a "hero" due to the hardships to which research in our country was faced a little more than a century ago. I did not want to applaud the afternoons of confinement because I did not want to contribute to the symbolic inflation in which we have been installed for too long, a symptom of a kind of collective delirium that distances us further and further from reality and prevents us from acting in a truly transformative about her. Proof of this social neurosis is that nothing has essentially improved in our public health system . And their "heroes" are still alone. The citizens don't even bother to applaud now. The idea of ​​the hero is mythical in nature.