Sick...

Today, I publish this post with my heart absolutely broken and after crying myself to sleep, if I could get some…, last night. Yesterday we woke up to the most terrible breaking news, the massive fire that completely destroyed a huge tower block in central London.

Every update was more and more terrifying… At the beginning I thought it could be another terror attack but then, after further information, we all realized that it was even worse, because we very sadly know that we are all living under a permanent terror threat, but there is a more insidious threat, a nastier one, the one that comes from the failures and careless of our own political systems, the ones that define our existence day by day.

What we saw yesterday was hundreds of people left to die in a fire trap build by the City where they live and work and pay taxes. It has been too many mistakes so far in every tragedy we suffered in this country for the last few months. Too many people reports and claims being ignored until it was too late.

I am a Doctor in Philosophy and I came to this country running away from the academic corruption in Spain, so famous that there is no need to say more, and I came to the UK because I thought this could be a wonderful place to start over. I still think it and I really love London and the UK. I was in the UK before, when I came to Oxford for an academic visit while working in my Ph.D, and it was absolutely great. These last years I have been teaching and working on the translation of my books into English, laborious process, and I have been very busy with a proper philosophical task, I have been watching, collecting experiences and analyzing every aspect of my new home, reaching some times terrifying conclusions.

I am assisting to all the Brexit process completely amazed, because I am convinced about Europe being maybe the only hope for the working and middle class here on the UK. I watch everyday the adverts on the British TV of loans and credits cards with rates of 99, 129 or even 135 per cent interest. This is only an example of something that in Spain, for instance, is unacceptable, a pure example of the greed that reigns here and the lack of respect for the people that keeps this country going, wherever they come from. Let’s not talk now about the pensions and other basic workers rights… If you come from other European countries you are unable to believe what the government consider a public pension here in the UK, it is absolutely ridiculous, and no one seems to be asking for any changes. They seem to want people being force to appeal to charity, instead of giving them what they truly deserve.

I go to my work everyday and everyday I come home with the knowledge of something being really wrong with the education in this country, the disgraceful conditions in which teachers and the rest of the staff must work, and the bitter feeling of a total lack of interest and support from the government. Once again, seems that they simply do not care. It seems that lots of the children of this country are not meant to attend any higher or further education, that seems to be the hidden and unspoken governmental plan for them. 

The UK is struggling with a class conflict and it is about time that the whole system begins to be questioned from their very deep roots. This country works on the base of a terrible dialectics, charity versus privileges. What are needed in this country are rights, respect, decency and quality of life. The education must be something else than prepare our young people to fill future benefit claim forms. And I say “our” because this is now my country, it is the place I have chosen to give away everything I have to offer, it is the country where I pay my taxes and insurance number contributions and it is a country full of amazing people that do not deserve the situations they are going through lately.

Nowadays, to be honest, scares me the most the turning point we are living in politics in some of the western countries, justifying racist and xenophobic behaviour and coming back to speeches that remind too much to those given in Europe in the 30s, we all know with which results... I saw the Prime Minister talking about making public lists of foreigner workers, like a kind of public shame for the ones that are hiring them. I though then that it was only the beginning and that so much more was to come. Very few people seemed to take it seriously by then. I saw the same Prime Minister talking about the Islamic extremism as defined by their fight against our freedom, our life style and our human rights tradition (completely agree), and I saw her on the very next day saying that it is time for the UK to leave human rights limitations and boundaries behind…, precisely what makes our societies so rich and precious. I thought we have learnt our lessons in Europe…, now I start to doubt it.

Something better changes. When you see a resident crying because they were systematically ignored in their claims for security at their homes, when you see people burning alive with no way out, when you see that the refurbishment of their building only was due to the fact of being an ugly block in a very posh area, when you see the council saying that they did the right thing and that they gave them a more beautiful environment to live (or to die) in…, it makes you sick, so sick that hurts.

London belongs to all of us and yesterday we all died a little inside that trap that so many called home once.

No more excuses and no more lies. Someone needs to answer for those that lost everything, and even when the solidarity and support of the people living in this city has been amazing once again, it is not the only response that you would expect from a European or western country. In Europe we expect governmental actions and support, authorities taking charge and responsibility for what happened to their citizens. This people deserve compensations, they deserve their rights back (unfortunately no one could never be able of giving them back their families and loved ones), they deserve official responses, and they deserve, as some voices are asking today, that the people responsible for this massacre responds for their actions, not in the way of a civil report but in a penal court being judged for major crimes against the people of this city. I do not know why the do not already started to take some of the people involved into the police stations. 

The people from the Grenfell tower deserve to be subjects of rights, no charity projects. No one can understand, in a major tragedy like this one, the lack of official responses and actions in a country with a long democratic history. The people in the streets are the ones that are taking the lead of the actions, giving the supplies, the means and the money needed to support the victims. 

These London families were yesterday the tragic subjects of a very dark drama, and Great Britain does not look so great today, with an official response that you could expect from an underdeveloped country that does not have any resources, but never from a country in Europe. Where were all the authorities yesterday, whoever that is getting paid with the taxes and efforts of every citizen? They should be there from the very beginning, all of them, showing their faces.

A country that mistreats the working and middle class and the weakest ones is always at stake (they do not have to be necessarily poor, at least not before this tragedy, as some journalists are saying, some of them are simply middle or working class, even property owners that bought their flats with their work and effort), it is a country going no where and in permanent risk of total break down. It is time for the people to demand their rights back, and a big debate should be following the tears that today we are all sharing.

Yesterday’s tragedy should have never happened here. It is time for everyone to stand out and say it, and it seems that everybody starts to talk aloud at last. These people, these families, these kids, were set up to die in the most horrible way, probably for the only reason of not living in a building glamorous enough for Kensington and Chelsea, as some sources are pointing out.

If we carry on like always, something is really wrong with this system. If the perpetrators of this atrocity are not prosecuted to the very last one, we are living in a massive faulty political system.

There are lots of things to say about so many aspects that should be deeply reviewed in this country but firstly, today, it was mandatory to talk about the horror we are suffering lately. We are experiencing the horror of realizing so many wrong things and assisting to so many unnecessary and terrible deaths. It seems more important for the government to close a deal to keep their own struggling power position going, rather than going to face the people they should be answering to..., but of course, Brexit comes first, because once the deal is done, we will be completely left alone on their hands. The last election showed clearly that this is not what the people want. Let’s hope that all this shameless will come to an end very soon, otherwise I do not see any light at the end of this dark path, tragically full of corpses.