Gods and Civil Servants
Stability or … much needed change.
The next stop on the Camino a Ítaca…civil servants and premature death. Read the original Spanish version here or the English below.
The frayed, red and white plastic tape spun around in the wind,
cordoning off the area like a crime scene. Large blocks of faded plastic lay
like bleached whalebones poking out of the sand on some remote beach. Then
there was the silence. Streets and squares, normally so full of life, were reduced
to leaves blowing under empty swings that shifted in the breeze.
The empty, cordoned off children’s playgrounds during the
lockdown is one of the pandemic scenes that I will never forget. The hollow
squares next to them, with their chained up plastic tables and chairs, looked
like just another quiet Sunday morning but the red and white tape strung between
the lampposts was a potent symbol of something very, very wrong.
Children’s parks here in Spain have always intrigued me. In a
country that is so child-friendly, I always have always wondered why the majority
of children’s parks are so poorly equipped. It often seems as though they are
urban planning afterthoughts, acting solely as a complement to the adjoining
terraces that do bring in some money to the town hall’s coffers. Yet under the
lockdown, one lie empty while the other simply ceased to exist.
The rather morbid image brought to mind that, much in the same
way that gods reflect their creators, parks too reflect those that bring them
into existence. They are both products of people’s desires, fears and prejudices
and both bear the indelible stamp of those that create them.
Their inspiration also comes from parallel sources. Divine
inspiration has been known to reveal golden plates to con men in places like
New York state, but it almost invariably seeks out poor and illiterate souls living
in wretched conditions for its immutable message. Messages that demand
unquestioning faith and the occasional genocide in return for questionable
future promises.
The inspiration to build parks, in contrast, comes from a more
earthly though not altogether less conceited source. One that also has the
habit of making questionable future promises. Politicians make promises to
their flock, but it’s the civil servants that make them a reality. Public
servants that also live in a wretched state.
Blasphemy some may say. After all, the myth of the carefree
civil servant is almost as potent and ingrained as that of people rising from
the dead, but is it necessarily true?
Once the poor souls have memorized their temarios,
regurgitated them and passed go to collect their posts, funcionarios are also
damned to live under a system that is as ridged and unforgiving as the harshest
interpretations of scripture. They find themselves managed by rules that few
really understand and find that, no matter what they do or even how well they
do it, the rewards are metaphysical at best.
This stifling structure is reflected in the parks’ design. The
kids have few risks to manage and take, no real opportunity to move from one
stage to the next. It’s safe, sterile and like the public corps, a premature graveyard
of whalebones and ideas.
During this temporary truce
with the disease, kids have returned to the parks. Even if they are no zip
lines or natural spaces, they still manage to create and to figure out a way to
have fun despite the controlled environment. Symbols that even the hardest held
myths can be overcome.
