There are meanings that are difficult to explain to children and they need years and examples to understand the meaning. Happens to the word ‘dignity’, perhaps because it does not yet have owners, unlike what they have done to another neighboring word: ‘freedom’, now a prey to propaganda until it becomes an antonym of itself. Freedom, which belongs to no one, is wanted by those who discovered long ago that in order to control the world and collect taxes, they had to start by appropriating ideas. Few battles are more ideological than those over language.
Dignity is not measured or seen and the dictionary definition falls short even though they have put it eight different meanings. Sometimes dignity is an outburst, a no on time. Strong close the door. A well-placed paragraph or one we have come to here. Other times, the most difficult, it is a whole trajectory and tested, a life. What no one can dispute is that dignity is not given by plaques of homage or statues engraved in stone so that they last for several generations. It is not given by the names of the streets or avenues. Those streets distinguish the people to whom, for some reason or for some debt, tribute is paid, but in reality the plaques say more about those who decided to put them at all times, those who send or send, which are the ones who are generous or vindictive.
Says a lot about someone who denies a writer the name of a public library and find instead logical the award to a virgin for the miracles attributed to him. That hardly gives us clues about the writer in question and even less about her dignity. It gives them, perhaps, of the administrations that governed it and of what their priorities were. That, after all, confirms what Almudena Grandes had written in several of her novels: that in unknown people who will never be given a street or a corner, there is the dignity that many of those who already have them do not deserve. We have learned that illustrious names should not be confused with good names, or glory with dignity.
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Authentic nobility, and the world knows that, very often appears in the simplicity of small things, of gestures that matter and are not perceived. In the dedication of a book, at the end of a verse. In a memory: because dignity consists in having memory and honoring it. It consists of staying, so simple and so difficult. Dignity is in the one who has the courage to face up, no matter how much others turn their backs or, worse still, sideways. Dignity, in short, will never be given by the plaques or the street vendor, nor can a city council distribute it as they please, because what fits and is perceived in a thousand walls would not fit in the kiss of a goodbye, the kiss that is given on the covers of a collection of poems before drop it into the pit, to stay there and forget. To be remembered for life: the dignity of a kiss.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com