Listening to Catalan political activist Ada Colau

By Swasky, Barcelona, Catalonia

Last Wednesday, I had the opportunity to listen to Ada Colau, “a Catalan social and political activist and is currently spokesperson for Guanyem Barcelona“, a new political party. “Colau was one of the founding members and spokespeople of the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) (Mortgage Victims Platform)“. She spoke about how we must to empower ourselves because is the only way to improve our lives.

She introduced herself as part of a generation with the best academic background who doesn’t experienced living in a dictatorship. Spain suffered near forty years of general Franco’s dictatorship, from 1939 to 1975. She continued talking about how a huge number of people accepted insanes mortgages which lead most of them to a poverty situation. The “PAH” (Mortgage Victims Platform)

was founded thinking that they would have found angry people, however, they found devastated people, ashamed because they have failed to the original dream of being owners of a nice home.

“Kidnapped Democracy” was shouted in 2012 in front of the Spanish parliament, but it was six years ago, in may 2006, that social movements started going out to the streets and asking to politicians a change. Ada Colau said “change” starts with becoming aware of our present values don’t work, consumerism is not the best foundation of our society, it is a failed way of life, Spain is proof, but unfortunately this is a global issue, for instance there is the big problem with the American debt crisis, just to mention one of them.

According to Ada Colau this is the reason people want to influence locally and propose to control politicians, asking to them crystal clear agendas and follow ethic codes.

At the end people start a interesting debate about local issues and I payed attention to an old man who introduce an interesting topic: “How does everything move on if everybody is on Facebook?”. He ended “Everything distracts our attention”.