I'm not revealing anything if I point out that the housing problem is taking on dramatic overtones on this island. We admit (symptoms of community immunization) with silent resignation its bloody and perverse social effects, which, on the other hand, have ceased to be exclusive among the most vulnerable groups.
Every day the spectrum of affected families is widening and its primary causes are moving away from links associated only with the scarcity of economic resources and/or uprootedness. We find people included in the labor market and with stable incomes crippled in their access to housing without this right implying an excessive breakdown of the resources they have to live on.
The unbridled ambition and lack of scruples of many has invaded us. We demand (defense with warrior ardor in some cases) the freedom and life of the markets, but we sacrifice without hesitation the dignity of people, severely devastated by particular interests.
This housing crisis has been or is being very agile in promoting its supposed economic benefits. The issue raises several sociological edges in this community shipwreck, but its true face is humanitarian. The disaffection towards the other, towards their life circumstances. Not everything is worth a handful of euros.
We have not understood that poverty kills and portrays us as a society. Ferocity, the hunger for personal accommodation, the ande yo caliente... We have chosen a cold path, a dark path based on the misery of many people. We have dismissed betting decisively on the protection of citizen dignity. Without some minimum coexistence, without that respect for the common good we are heading towards a collective jungle of shadows.
I am not going to delve into the responsibility that our political managers have in this matter. Nor in the complexity of eviction procedures (although vulnerability reports deserve a separate reflection) or in the timid and deceitful legal patches that give shelter to these situations of exploitation and inequality generated by the market by itself. I intend to emphasize the situation of indignity and defenselessness in which many families live.
How is it possible that there are entire families living in unacceptable conditions of habitability and safety? How is it possible that the phenomenon of substandard housing is advancing without control? How is it possible that its development is allowed with such a degree of devastation, including relevant processes of degradation and social exclusion, especially grotesque in various parts of the island? And the worst of all is the way in which this absence of civic shame is deployed through the entrails of the island.
We have normalized the precariousness and pain of all these people. The urgency of primary needs drowns any attempt at collective action.
Civil poverty has a lot to do with that feeling of loneliness, that permanent frustration, that fear of failure, that longing that does not go away...