who's coming?
Yesterday’s general strike concluded without further agression – thank you to whomever had sense enough to cool the hotter heads in the room. Now begins the media battle, and probably some sort of legal battle.
To make sense of the right-wing response from Madrid (“Mine! Mine!”): at 20% of the Spanish GDP, Catalunya leaving the federation would be a bigger economic blow to the Iberian peninsula than if California, Oregon and Washington State joined to declare their independence, becoming some glistening, insane, ephemeral digitocracy, poised to shake into the sea with San Andreas’ next rumble. Catalunya has a history as an independent State, so a “bipartisan” Congress’ hard-line response would have the greater force of law.
The other day, a friend of a friend wrote (paraphrased): “I am Catalan, and for the Catalan people; yet I am more for erasing borders and finding common cause and governance, than I am for creating new ones.”
No doubt, the current doctrine of fear being thrown up (all senses of that phrase) by world leaders, first and foremost mine, is the death-spasm of the end of an era. There truly are no borders, when our global fate is linked ever more clearly to our common consumption and common destruction, common greed and common blindness. Anyone for the next great spiritual Guide? I’m listening.
