In summer, have your Christmas lights ready
We live in days in which almost everything becomes an ideological banner, and Christmas lighting could not be an exception.
PalmIt's been quite a few years since the State Lottery and Betting Company, a public company, began selling Christmas lottery tickets in the middle of July. This year has been different: sales began on June 30th. Anxiety is growing, and the need to move faster to place bets for what is still the ultimate dream of many subjects of the Kingdom of Spain: winning the Christmas Gordo. In this sense, a comparison can be made with the Spanish Football League, which each year takes its holidays shorter and starts again earlier. Both the Christmas Gordo and the Spanish Football League are two great dreams for many people; for many, perhaps the greatest dreams, who knows, perhaps the only ones. This makes it important to keep them going for a long time, to give people their chance to dream. To ask themselves what they would do if they won a massive prize, or perhaps just a sliver, but worth several tens of thousands of euros. Wondering if your favorite player will score many goals this year, if injuries will respect your team (they say that, if injuries will respect the team), and above all, and most importantly, if things will go badly for the opponent, and if possible, terribly badly. These are the dreams of good people, and it's really necessary to keep them burning as long as possible throughout the year. The emotional and psychological stability of many people depends on them, and also, let's face it, huge businesses that generate impressive amounts of money.
Christmas lights are directly related to the Christmas lottery, and indirectly to the Football League. We live in days where almost everything becomes an ideological banner, and Christmas lights could not be an exception. Two truly luminous figures from the Spanish right paved the way: Mr. Abel Caballero, mayor of Vigo for eighteen years, and Xavier Garcia-Albiol, who has spent approximately eight years as mayor of Badalona in different terms. Caballero was the first to take the plunge, but after a while, Garcia-Albiol decided to compete with him to see which of the two cities, Galicia or Catalonia, would have the tallest and most spectacular Christmas tree in Spain. Or in the world, but in the imagination of these two strategists, the world is Spain, and vice versa.
In parallel, something else happened: the climate alert, or concern about climate change, gained a lot (not enough yet, obviously). There are many different reactions to the evidence that the human species needs to redirect its relationship with the natural environment, but a very widespread one, especially in backward societies, is a recalcitrant denialism that is related in time to those who refused to accept the rotation of the Earth around the Sun. A certain right wing (which is not the same everywhere, but does coincide quite completely with what we have here) decided that the climate alert was part of the progressive dictatorship, or woke, which they see everywhere, and their single-minded way of thinking. And they began to develop speeches (few) and actions (some more) to combat the ideologies that, in their opinion, seek to put an end to their freedoms.
Massive electric fluid turds
Among these actions, the massive use of electricity is among the most striking and most celebrated by its perpetrators. If the dictators of progressives, accompanied by the insufferable scientists who, for whatever reason, enjoy making us feel sorry for their warnings, recommend moderation in electricity consumption, then the answer is wholesale and unconscionable waste of electricity. And what better way to do it than with the excuse of the Christmas celebration, which traditional imagination has associated with a false do-goodism (it's curious, but as much as they criticize the supposed do-goodism of the left, the right is full of do-goodisms: the do-goodism of the family, that of the business, that of the security forces, that of the monarchy that they always have right there: that people spend everything they have on the Christmas campaign, those who get extra pay and those who don't. Street lighting, paid for with public money, is one of the main stimulants of compulsive Christmas shopping. That's why they have to have them up by July, lest the illusion fade.
