Today, Laura and I went to San Sebastian computer shopping with the dual purpose of looking for information concerning computer jobs in San Sebastian. We didn't meet with much success but the owner of one store told us to send him a resume and he'd take a look and maybe pass it along.
We walked and walked all over looking at the various colors of fall adorning the city streets. Red helmeted municipal guards garbed in riot gear started gathering in town plazas and corners. Camouflaged civil guards stood in bands of three with their hands in their pockets, gray hand held communicators abuzz with static. Basque civil police also patrolled sectors in their sky blue uniforms with flat black berets and sweaters.
Signs painted in vivid red and back adorned the rails that bounded the street corners as groups of young people conversed and milled about. Their multicolored backpacks were all stuffed full looking perhaps a bit too heavy for their thin shoulders.
It was a day of strike and the student organizations decided upon the issue and time. They chose Friday and the issue of classroom size as a dollop atop their weekend dessert.
Across the street people stood in a row holding a sign in Basque blocking the entryway to a local bank, Banco Bilbao Viscaya (BBV) . I thought to myself that such a gathering designed to disrupt business would not occur in the U.S. They would at least force them to gather elsewhere, then I thought of pro-life groups and thought, "well if it means that much to you."
These colorful days in the city, of blowing breeze, noisy energetic kids, and vivid reminders of government gave me much to think about, about my time in Korea, where I saw the same thing, a weekly clash with riot police in full regalia, where students spouted the same rhetoric of oppression and injustice.
In the U.S., student unions spent their time trying to figure out how to spend the beer money, cheap and plentiful Milwaukee's Best, or expensive and savory Heineken, and the closest thing to civil protest is the spring turnabout dance.
Both Korea and Spain have been oppressed from the inside, and from without. But then I thought that the youths were not old enough to really remember Franco, but then they are their parents children.
Maybe it's a constant reminder that the people are there. Maybe the issues aren't well timed or poignant, but "hey here we are." It's a holdover, a culture created by those that would ignore them believing that the individual didn't matter. Well it's not the individual, stupid, it's the group, the mob, the burning tires, ransacked buses and trains. The individual doesn't matter, but you've got to listen to us.
Something bothered me about the whole scene, sickened me. Can't quite put a finger on it. I guess the only thing I can come up with is that while the masses figure that the individual is ignored that the only way to be heard is to make noise, yelling with collective anger, they are validating the silence of the individual, blending the single voice into that angry chorus, oppressing, drowning, and corrupting.
It reminds me of child abuse. Just because a child is beaten doesn't mean that they are less likely to beat.