This is a summer of disproportion, and it is so not only because of an eclipse that, at the rate we are going, we will have to watch from our home TV, because only those who have paid to come to Mallorca will have the right to contemplate it... The unbearable heat is also disproportionate, the highest since records began in 1961, with a persistence that highlights one of our main vulnerabilities: no matter how much the tourism industry and Aena pretend that records of tourists and flights can be beaten year after year, natural resources, but also the system and infrastructures, have limits, even if no politician dares to define them clearly.
Real limits, not like those that are announced and never arrive, such as the car restriction designed to calm the spirits of residents who a few weeks ago took to the streets in Palma and are taking to the streets again these days in Sóller, where life has been altered to such an extent that it is no longer a consolation to have the 'privilege' of living in one of the most beautiful municipalities in the country.
The intervention of the riot police at the demonstration on July 26 was also disproportionate, with levels of unnecessary violence that we hope will not be repeated, but there is no guarantee that this will not happen, because, as I argued in my previous article, the strategy of power involves unfairly singling out the weakest link in the chain, migrants, and strengthening the State's repressive mechanisms.
Disproportion is also what residents who have to work in August (the majority, by the way) feel, when more people pass through the Balearic airports, and they have to take diminished public transport. Disproportion is wanting to grow, in quantity or quality, and not taking charge of the demographic growth and the use of services and infrastructures by everyone who lives in Mallorca, not counting tourists. Disproportion is renouncing, just last year, more than 500 million euros in taxes to strengthen these services and infrastructures, so that those who already have a good patrimony continue to enrich it while the majority, for not having, do not even have the right to prevent any unscrupulous landlord from expropriating their full salary and part of their partner's. Disproportion is that a chambermaid has to clean more than twenty rooms a day for a salary that does not pay her rent, while hotel chains announce, yet another year, record profits.
Disproportion is the social and institutional silence over the twenty deaths that were trying to arrive by dinghy a few days ago to the Islands, and over the more than a hundred deaths in Ceuta: no minutes of silence, no half-mast flags, no minimal words of humanity. If they had been tourists, there would have been state funerals. If it had been a hotelier, a promenade would have been inaugurated in his name.
Disproportion is inventing scandals day after day to bring down the Spanish government, while the president of the community of Madrid and maximum leader of the PP in the absence of Feijóo is prevaricating, whether by traveling to Mexico or by spending millions of public euros on luxury penthouses whose purpose is still unclear. Disproportionate is the diligence of judges and prosecutors in some cases, and the convenient silence in others.
Disproportionate is demanding fifteen years of residency to access an officially protected dwelling, as if years of residency made you a citizen or justified that you are the one who needs it most. Because those who decide these things do so thinking mainly of those who do not need housing, like someone who believes that, with more than half the population earning less than 18,000 euros annually, any bank will give you a mortgage for a 'limited price' dwelling. Extreme disproportion is if we compare the number of new tourist places created in this quarter-century with the number of officially protected dwellings. Also that there are already more than a third of municipalities with more tourist places than residential ones.
Just as disproportion is, regardless of one's own condition, objectifiable (a millionaire does not have to be sensitive to inequality, but cannot deny it), even if not always visible; proportion is entirely subjective, because it refers us to the idea that each person has a certain level of balance: there are extremists – and even pseudo-journalists – who consider that the police charges at the demonstration called by Less Tourism, More Life were proportionate. Just as there are those who consider that this situation in Ceuta is an invasion, and that the proportionate response of the fatherland's males must consist of hunting North Africans.
Only an effective democracy can reduce the enormous disproportion that we are experiencing these days, and which is on its way to making our existence too difficult – and for many, impossible. A democracy that does not establish clear limits to everything and of everything, starting by putting a stop to the social, environmental and convivial predation of the economic model, is not democracy. Let's start by calling things by their name.
