Sometimes you have to enjoy the chaos to glimpse everything better, even if a specific mess includes tons of inclemency. I am referring, obviously, to the delirious week of trains experienced in Catalonia which, as always happens with everything related to Rodalies, has especially affected the economy and life in Barcelona. The reader must already be sufficiently fed up with the media-railway fuss (don't worry, next week we will talk about theater, about Rodoreda, or about your aunt on a scooter), so I will get straight to the point with some very simple observations. The first is well known to all: Catalonia ---and even more so its capital--- has a precarious mobility service that will not be able to adapt to the times and population growth even with an investment that centuples the fiscal deficit. Second, despite changes in Renfe's internal management, the Generalitat does not control one of the most elementary structures to make the country function minimally.
I understand that users especially focus on the first aspect I mentioned, but it is worth focusing on the political aspect because ---after all the charade of the business restructuring of Rodalies Catalunya, where we had been sold that the Generalitat would dominate the scene by presiding over it--- a simple stand by the train drivers (Spanish) was enough for, for the first time in its democratic history, the country to spend a day without a single fucking train circulating through the territory. I emphasize that I write "stand" and not strike, a right that we respect almost religiously at home. From this perspective, I take the opportunity to congratulate all Catalan parties, including the one that claims to govern us, who, faced with the blackmail of the train drivers, agreed to maintain their labor agreement (Spanish) because the workers did not feel like joining a Catalan company; at home, we usually call that racism.
The Generalitat says it wants to open disciplinary proceedings against the train drivers for their negligence regarding the public service they should be obliged to guarantee, but you can already imagine what Renfe workers will do with this threat in the face of a coercive power equivalent to toilet paper (even more so if, as the minister for the matter, Sílvia Paneque, confessed, the Government itself had no idea of the snub in question). Well, let's continue with the political narration of the events, since, after a day without trains ---or in the idiolect of acting president Dalmau, a day "that will not be easy at all"--- Minister Paneque herself assured us that, yesterday, the resumption of service would be "progressive", but without any information about which lines would operate or at what time one could go to the stations. In other words, and without mincing words: the citizens of the country have spent (for now) three days without knowing if they could go to work normally.
This was a Government that had presented itself to the citizenry as a guarantor of autonomous pax and had promised the independentists of the tribe that they would forget about this very nineteenth-century idea of secession, thanks to an immaculate management of public services. Well, this week is not only a sample of the perverse illusion of that colonial gaze on the country, but also of the confirmation that with Spain only misery awaits us. Because any Rodalies user understands that, at this moment, there is no rain of millions or singularity in financing that can save a network in which, even on days of apparent normality, one does not know when they will arrive at the office or their home. I recommend indignant users not to refer to this drama as a third-world matter, because this relegates us to general poverty; the problem is that, precisely, we could be a first-world country.
All this, I dare to insist, are observations that everyone knows, including the pro-independence businessmen who live in the closet of the third way and ---in public--- give lectures on how to "build bridges between Barcelona and Madrid" or also the apologists of unionism who, in order not to flee Spain in a hurry, prefer that their fellow citizens spend hours with a stupid look on their faces at the Maçanet-Massanes station. Everyone knows this and the only thing we need now is to get rid of the state-dependent political class and endemic procesismo to enter with guarantees into the new world that awaits us just around the corner. Only when all this happens will it make sense to face the debate on the health of the catenaries and which tracks should be polished so that they look like the jewels of the queen mother. Until this entire historical period arrives, all we can do is wait, be late and live inside the train with fear of falling to our death.