By Echedey Eugenio Felipe
Just over two years have passed since the new public positions were taken in each of the administrations of Lanzarote and the Canary Islands and it is time, why not, to dedicate a few minutes to reflection. ...
Just over two years have passed since the new public positions were taken in each of the administrations of Lanzarote and the Canary Islands and it is time, why not, to dedicate a few minutes to reflection.
There are almost two more years of legislature ahead and this is, in my opinion, the time to correct mistakes, improve forms and, if any, reinforce and consolidate successes.
We are public workers and as such we owe ourselves to our "bosses", those who with their effort pay our salaries. Our work is always, and should be, under the watchful eye of citizens and it is to them that we must be accountable. Not because in two years the formations will be submitted to their examination again (which also) but because that is why they elected us in 2011, we have a commitment to Lanzarote and we are obliged to fulfill it.
I can say today, two years later, that it is a pride to have had the opportunity to perform the public function for which, first the residents of Teguise with their votes and then the Mayor with his confidence, designated me.
I must recognize that this is a path of ups and downs: great satisfactions or enormous disappointments, fulfilled objectives or eternal blockages, complaints or congratulations, days in which you have the sensation of having solved the problems that arise and others in which it seems that your work is useless because the eternal bureaucracy slows everything down. In these months I have been able to feel both the impotence of not being able to respond to people who, even with all the will in the world, had to be told NO, as well as the satisfaction that with just a small gesture, interest in the problems and desire to work and to solve you can contribute your grain of sand to make the environment in which we live a better place for people.
The municipal work is complicated, and sometimes even frustrating. The norm, although mandatory, can become stupid since it is very easy for the gentlemen of Madrid (or even closer) to write rules or regulations from the comfort of their leather armchairs and at 20 º degrees of their acclimatized offices but REALITY IS ON THE STREET. Next to the neighbor who does not make it to the end of the month or the one to whom someone, on a map sometimes even badly made in those comfortable offices, marks a yellow line that, with forms more typical of other regimes, subtracts rights that as owner should have. I would put those in their shoes and take them to tour the 23 towns of our municipality and listen to the problems of our more than 20,000 inhabitants. Local politics is, without a doubt, the best School and many of those senators, deputies, ministers, secretaries of state, undersecretaries, directors, provincial delegates, island delegates and other state associates should go through it so that they do not move so far from the feeling of the people.
Don't these gentlemen consider that when they have to use police or security or barriers to separate them from who actually puts them there, that is, the people, there is something that is failing in the system?
I myself answer my question: No, they live another reality. The one of the rococo buildings, the soft leather armchairs, the acclimatized offices, the countless positions of trust, the official cars, the large hotels. And that reality is very different from that of the rest of the people.
The coasts law, the maritime-terrestrial demarcation in La Caleta, the limits of the state in La Graciosa or the law of rationalization of local administrations are just small samples of what happens when those who do not know, legislate and draw lines and rules from their offices forgetting their mission.
These gentlemen forget that regulation and regulations must be a tool for the improvement of societies and the development of people and that they lose their essence when they abandon that philosophy to become obstacles or brakes to evolution. An evolution that must be orderly, planned, respectful of the environment, according to our reality and adjusted, but EVOLUTION.
The models of society, growth and future must be decided by the citizens and not four enlightened people from an office in Madrid.
Some time ago we entered Teguise, the new group of councilors, and in Coalición Canaria, the new management, with the conviction that things could change and "boy have they done it". The road is long and many times there are more stumbles than help but with dedication, effort and a lot of work things come out. Today, two years later, I stop and reflect: we have done things, changed forms and fulfilled promises but there is still a lot of work ahead and we must self-criticize what we have left behind, what is half done, what we did wrong and correct the mistakes. And although there is much to be done, it will be the citizens who, in less than two years, will value the work, effort or dedication that the people who put a face to the nationalist project for the Canary Islands have carried out in the administrations.
Politicians cannot transform ourselves into a separate class, we are people, citizens, who have decided to take a step forward to contribute our grain of sand to improve a society of which we are part. With our successes, our mistakes, our virtues and our defects but certainly without ever losing the north or lifting our feet off the ground on which we tread. Someone should remind some of this.
