PIGEONHOLING AND REFUSING TO BUDGE

ETA, Herri Batasuna and Arzallus have reminded me lately of some reflections that I consider important. For once, allow me to write about issues which are not, apparently, economic.

In spite of what is published, and contemplating real facts and attitudes, it does not appear that we live in a flexible, open, tolerant and secularised society, but rather it appears that anyone who goes for a walk through our streets and neighbourhoods is proud of continuing the medieval inquisitorial habit of discrediting others. We are continually dedicated, almost without realizing, to rigidly limiting others with infamies, which will prove hard for the victims to be able to get rid of. We substitute the substantial for the purely accidental, the content for the continent, the permanent for the mere anecdote, the important for the incidental, and the person for the function. We pigeonhole people with multiple straitjackets that trap us, and they deform the original air that each one has. We are not already who we are, but rather, because of dependent circumstances, conventionalisms convert us into black or white; into northerners or southerners; workers or managers; machos or feminists; consumers or producers; Basques, Catalans, Aragonese, Andalusians, Bosnians, Canadians, Moroccans, Spaniards, Chinese or Japanese; Protestants or Muslims; smokers or non smokers; right-wing or left-wing; etc. etc. Not only do we substitute the radically inimitable personality for some accident or for some function, but immediately after, we form a homogeneous group with the accidental, we idolize it to unsuspected benchmarks, we pigeonhole and violently confront opposing groups making the bloodiest tribal fights a daily reality in the preamble of the XXI century.

I read some anthropological scientific studies recently where it was demonstrated that the whole of mankind originates from a single woman. We are all indigenous scattered throughout the world. I am not, being so, liberal, nor Valencian, nor from Madrid, nor Spanish, nor an economist, nor a professor, nor a believer, nor married. Each person is who he is and that's that - no more, no less than a citizen of the world. I am the ignoramus that I am and each one is the one that he is. To identify me is enough with the name. I am my parents' son, my children's father, and my wife's husband. I want to be, and I am, an integral stranger that requests continually - from obliging justice - something so simple and so vastly productive: PEACE!!!

Joseph John Franch
Professor of Political Economy
Autonomous University of Madrid