Dear Wise Men, I am from the island of La Graciosa; I have behaved very well this year and since, in addition to January 6, I have discovered that on Thursdays in the Canary Islands Government Council one can ask for whatever one wants now that the elections are approaching, I have dared to ask to be respected and for my people to be treated equally.
This is what I think the island of La Graciosa would say if it could express itself in writing, if it could address those who in the last four years have had the power of the Wise Men to perform miracles that never come for us.
As things stand, we could say that in a burst of Christmas spirit, Ángel Víctor has become Melchior with slightly shorter hair and instead of gold he carries a rose in his hand; Román has been in charge of modernizing the biblical image of Gaspar, endowing him with an imposing dark mustache, and finally there is Balthazar, the most coveted king, the one who is there but in the background, the one who almost always sees the perfect political strategy. Once they have gotten into the role, they have decided that there is no better occasion than a dissolved Parliament of the Canary Islands to distribute in agreement of the Governing Council everything they should have done in previous years. Our particular Wise Men will think that better late than never...
When I realized the situation, I thought, but if the administrative processes are so long that many times there is not enough time in a legislature to get things done that are done in the first minutes of a mandate, what are they going to do now with everything they are approving and announcing. There my political conscience, with whom I speak when I am alone in the car with the music at full volume, answers me: "Nieves, we citizens are not going to see it, it is just a headline in a pre-election month."
Then I understood La Graciosa, so many years feeling inferior, without the right to almost anything that is effective, without the right to anything that people can actually see. Waiting for management plans that do not arrive while its citizens try to develop their lives and businesses as they can, even though the management of the island often becomes a chaos.
The problem with politics in the Canary Islands with respect to La Graciosa is that they look at it as a lost cause; by saying "until the PRUG comes out" they have everything done, or not done, because the years go by and they are not able to move a paper. It must be exhausting to do so. And of course, the particular Wise Men that we have installed in the Government of the Canary Islands are very lucky, because in Lanzarote they have pages who are not able to stand their ground and ask them to get to work, to do what they have to do. They have done nothing and now they announce everything.
And it is that, although it is true that the serious problem we have on the island is the lack of planning, they could propose a development strategy for the eighth of the Canary Islands that has a minimum of foundation and desire. A strategy, it occurs to me, divided into three legs that can be executed in parallel and that citizens can see realities from the first minute of the mandate. It is that while the eternal documents come out, cleaning plans can be executed or a pediatrician can be managed to travel to La Graciosa. Only with a global and planned vision of what the paradise of the Canary Islands is will we enter the fray to achieve equality in duties and rights.
These are the neuroses that occur to me while I develop this strange infatuation with politics, wishing that the island where I grew up and where I now reside gets what it deserves by right for the simple fact of being it, without the need to feel on many occasions like San Borondón being La Graciosa. I believe that in politics one should work for and for the people without the need for letters to the Wise Men a month before the elections.
Many will laugh at how naive I am, and I consider myself more romantic than a Sunday afternoon movie. But believe me, the people of La Graciosa cannot laugh when it takes more than seven years to build our house, when we must ration the water that reaches our houses or when we assume that the sewage system will be seen by our grandchildren.
La Graciosa that you were, the same if in May we end up with the guano for flowers, the Canary Islands Wise Men will leave their layers and we will enter the race for all the Canarians to be equal.