What we must do now

When most visible becomes our collective condition of submission, some of our compatriots inclined to demoralize would like to throw in the towel. This state of mind is not only due to our inexistent trust in our leadership –we are unable to see them giving us a victory as a nation-, but combined with the most diffused voices within the public opinion, which are constantly generating a perception that Spain is winning the battle. In addition to that, the occupiers publish what they loot in form of fiscal balances and it does not happen anything.

Among our most representative people, all are laments and calls to resistance, and the formulae to escape from them are always the same: to stay put, to use the little we have and pray to the Virgin of Montserrat. No one of our main opinion makers of the country is going  beyond describing the adverse effects of the viruses called Spain and France. We lack so much in patriotic gestures that there have even been who has seen Jose Montilla’s last attitudes in the financial theme some reincarnation of Pau Claris. A victory can never be built on these foundations. Hence, what must be done? To continue with the same old unsuccessful attitudes or to have the audacity to begin walking through new pathways?

There will be who believes that there is no life beyond new political parties with representation in the Parliament. Most of these think that everything has to go through the sieve of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya or Convergencia i Unio, and they limit themselves to force “one step beyond” the main leaders of these formations. We have been so many years without having political parties that we think that maintaining the actual ones is our least harm. But reality says that this way of seeing things has consolidated a harmful ruling of the actual political parties that has smeared all with subsidies, dropping their pants down in front of the government of Madrid and make all kind of buttering up to the great communication or economic groups. It is not strange, then, that the beginning of a sensation that who is really in power within the Principality of Catalonia are some people with office at the top floor of some emblematic buildings in the city of Barcelona.

However, I reckon that seeing the last Congresses of the two parties self-called of exclusive Catalan subjection –what a sarcasm!- it does not invite to a lot of optimism. Seeing their results and confirming that the sensation that the end of an era has arrived it is the same thing. Their principal leaders would like to lengthen to the infinite the era of blurriness, but the people with clear Catalan national awareness is fed up with waiting and want something happening. They are neither willing to wait another ERC congress in June nor they believe the euphemisms that came out in the last conclave of CiU. Patriotic people want clarity because they consider exhausted the times of fuzziness. Ambiguity would work in other times and being the essence of one political party. This characteristic has even become one of the polling clues to govern Catalonia for twenty-three years. What has remained? A profound deception and the sensation that they have eaten some ground. This is how the promoters of this politics have acted, what can we expect from their political offsprings?

For all this, the idea of a new political formation that embodies a real, authentic, modern and operative support for independence is taking shape. With faces and styles without any connexion with thirty years of abandoning own principles. Possibly, this feeling is produced at the moment in small cores but is spreading quickly, and without any doubt is combined with the incompetency of the actual leadership of the country and the colonial treatment that Spain is brooded about visualize constantly. However, who will thread the needle?
From Catalunya Acció, we shall never tire to repeat this necessary convulsion in our politic arena. Even more, we shall not remain here. We shall do everything possible to become one of the foremost makers shaping this new hope that every day claim more Catalan patriots.

Santiago Espot 
CEO Catalunya Acció
(Article published at El Punt, 10-10-08)