A house at kilometer zero
Although Congress may have rejected the decrees, what happened may have started to change the way this country conceives of what a home is.
A public square becomes fully accessible when we use it to reveal our personal suffering and realize it is a shared concern. This is why it is so revealing how Ayuso, who governs the most expensive rental market in the country through competitions to intervene in it, seeks to treat the exercise of a right as a public order issue and erase what the square has shown.
However, social movements never speak solely outwardly to institutions seeking legislation, but also inwardly to the society they build through their protest. By bringing the needs that usually remain at home to the square, those gathering in Sol ask all of us to take responsibility for them, and in this city of fleeting shifts, care, and assemblies, they show that it is possible to inhabit together in a different way, one that no decree can capture.
Yet we are so accustomed to imagining the future as catastrophe (climate collapse, wars, machines replacing us) that any other possibility seems naive, as if common sense had already decided what is realistic and what is not.
Written by urgent.news from El Pais's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
