Politics or disaster
When a person approaches public affairs nowadays, they must have to take into account so many factors that it cannot be possible to end up doing anything properly. If the citizenry has the feeling that we are not governed by the best prepared or the most capable, but rather by a tribe of opportunists, skillful managers of political party strings, or savvy system officials who have known how to make the leap, it is because to a large extent it is so, or because the vocation of people with true passion for politics and public service is increasingly scarce. We are lacking ideas and, therefore, vocations.
If it is complicated to find a good carpenter or plumber, why shouldn't it be equally complicated to find a good politician? Not just someone with the ability to give explanations and move majorities, but, also, to manage public affairs with knowledge and success, from a certain vision of the country and the community. People who have the intelligence and the character to feel attracted to this world, however, as soon as they get a whiff of it, they run away terrified. It is not that we come from any long and healthy democratic tradition, either, in the Spanish state, where more years of right-wing dictatorship have been suffered than anywhere else. A fact like this is noticeable in our political, rhetorical, and civil tradition, in the collective habit of deciding the common good together. Here we are still learning, at the same time that the rest of the democratic world is unlearning it in the face of reactionary forces that seem to want to replace democracy with technocratic command, well-clad in nasty conservatism.
Furthermore, it must be quite frightening or intimidating, because each time not only transport can cause great distress but any other dimension of the collective: healthcare, justice, education, etc. Everything has become a powder keg surrounded by sparks and arsonists, and no matter how good the pay one might receive, no one wants to end up managing a hornet's nest that primarily attacks those closest to it. Politics, or political communication, the recruitment and fostering of political talent, debate, the management of plurality and complexity, all of this should be rebuilt from top to bottom. If not, we will continue to be trapped between apathy and the unbearable management of the latest disaster.
