On full explosion of the pandemic, when its consequences terrified us because we still did not know its true dimension, the journalist Íñigo Domínguez headlined an article in the newspaper ‘El País’: ‘We were happy and we didn’t know it’. The title had been given to him, according to him, by his hairdresser, who told him about the normality in which he lived in his native Venezuela and that suddenly went down the drain: “In those erratic talks, with the radio in the background, that they have each other at the hairdresser’s, we end up talking about how normality is suddenly broken. He told me how the situation deteriorated, he had no choice but to emigrate, and how now every morning of his life he remembered the day he had to close the door of his house and leave, and how every night he dreams of the moment when he will return to put the key in the lock and you can return to it. I have one sentence left. He told me that he has evoked many times what life was like before everything, the inconsequential chats in the bar, with friends, complaining about this and that, how time passed inconsequentially. And he said, ‘We were happy and we didn’t know it.'”
Since I read it, I have remembered that phrase and the article many times, which is, I think, the best description of the pandemic that has been made and whoever says about the pandemic says about war. Suddenly everything goes to hell and without one expecting it or being prepared for it, one finds that the normality in which he lived is not such and everything he thought impossible is happening to him. Two years ago it was the pandemic and now it is the war in europe (something we didn’t even imagine) and, in between, the eruption of a volcano that devastates an island and that of the worst ideas, which we thought had already been overcome but which come back from the 20th century to pose the dilemma of those who lived through it and suffered: fascism or democracy.
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The generations of Europeans who were born after the 1950s had arrived until today without having known a great war or a pandemic, a privilege that none had before in history. In Spain, specifically, there was no period of more than a quarter of a century without a war or a dictatorship, which in the case of those born after 1975 they did not even know. But suddenly good luck evaporated. In a short time, History was broken and things that we thought were alien to us are here again. First it was an economic crisis, then a health crisis (which is still going on) and, when we already thought we were going to get out of the previous two, a third has arrived, the war between Ukraine and Russia whose development and scope is not easy to predict as things are. And suddenly everyone, like the Venezuelan hairdresser from Inigo Dominguez, we have woken up from our sleep startled without quite believing that everything we are seeing is happening to us. And, like him, we began to value the happiness we had despite the fact that we were not aware of it. Because happiness was nothing but normality, that “how time passed in an inconsequential way, the talks in the bar with friends complaining about this and that & rdquor; that, when we lived it, it seemed boring and lacking in emotion and that now we see danger, which makes us nervous. Because happiness is that: being able to open your eyes every day without fear of doing so.