PalmaThese days the basic idea that violence cannot be answered with violence is going around in my head. It is a simple principle that can always be applied, but which has become present after the collective Menys Turisme, Més Vida circulated a manual with recommendations that include sabotage actions against tourist infrastructures. A cause as legitimate as the one being defended does not need this. Even more so, it cannot afford it.
Because yes, we live surrounded by violence. But we almost never call it that. Because it is violence to leave home and find that you can barely walk down the street, because you don't fit. It is violence for an airport like Son Sant Joan, which breaks record after record, overexploited and sold to advertising, to business, while we residents count the days we can enjoy a beach without having to fight for a patch of sand. It is violence not being able to access decent housing in the town where you grew up and where your people are. It is violence to wake up in the early morning to the cars and motorcycles that cross the city of Ibiza as if the streets were a circuit. It is violence, the cat tourism and also arriving at Caló del Moro and having to turn back, because it is full of people. It is violence for boats to occupy coves to the point of turning the sea into a parking lot.
It is, violence, to see how trees and farmland disappear to replace them with extensions of solar panels, even if the aim is decarbonization. It is for waste to accumulate to the point of having to transport it between islands. It is having to live with overcrowding that collapses roads, hospitals, public services, and any shared space. It is that, to have more and more, cycling tourism is promoted to levels of oversaturating the paths. It is violence, in short, the feeling that the Islands are no longer designed for those who live there.
Even the president of the Government, Marga Prohens, has admitted these days that we don't fit. It is difficult to find a more graphic definition of the unease that crosses the Balearic Islands. But if we really don't fit, why isn't it governed accordingly? Why aren't limits established? If this diagnosis only serves the president to connect with a widely shared sentiment and to launder policies that continue to favor growth, she better shut up. It is violent to have to listen to it.
In any case, the discourse on limits is impeccable. So is the defense of habitable Islands, of a model that puts the well-being of residents above records. It is a necessary and probably majority claim. Precisely for this reason, it cannot be contaminated with any appeal to violence.
The Balearic Islands need less violence. Less urban violence. Less acoustic violence. Less environmental violence. Less real estate violence. Less tourist violence. Less political violence. And also less violence as a proposal to combat them.
