Translated by: Laura Rodríguez Durán - laura_spa[at]hotmail.com
This is a voluntary-based translation. Proposals, proofreading and comments about the understandability of the contents highly appreciated here
© Pablo Castiñeiras
Time has gone by since I took the plunge full of prospects that I wouldn’t even know in what they were based on. Time has gone by since I got back home, resigned, wishing to continue those adventures (something more common than what I thought, among european ex volunteers hooked on that promise of europolitans dreamers).
Once the time passed by, it was me the one that had to continue with the promise and moved to the other side. The opportunity of playing the role of those brave trainers that tried to mitigate my scepticism, during the training courses for European volunteers I attended, to face the learning and initiative possibilities that life and will was offering me. Finally, after having realized all that, it is me who try to persuade that feeling of being able to do things, to resist the lack of action and frustration.
Despite my clumsiness, I consider that maybe the effort is worth it, foremost, when I see a bunch of young people, from different places in Europe, attending to those courses that the European Voluntary Service organizes when the selected people get to a new country. There they can tell how they see us; we can think about cultural shocks that could be produced among us; we learn how to solve conflicts, how to learn and be more autonomous thanks to this experience, etc.
I’m lucky to meet up with young people excited for the world and the life in a way that I couldn’t have ever imagined, despite fears and uncertainties that they try to fight with happiness, rebelliousness and hope. They make me feel very local and small and I envy those Welfare societies that promote and allow their young people to see the horizon from different latitudes. Opportunities given by some civic societies to avoid wasting time looking for what someone was searching for and wasn’t arriving.
I feel optimistic, even euphoric, when I check that despite all the attempts of becoming us a living dead, adoring virtual idols and invisible drugs, the hope that encourages human being to move on is in more young people’s mind than we even think. A lot of youngsters don’t even dare to say what they really think; to scatter to every corner that they really know more than what outdated reactionary powers wished they to know.
I only hope that these few young people that I had the chance to meet and tried to cheer up, because they did not lack inspiration, and the others that I met and that I know that I will find on my way, are capable of defeating our inner fear and distrust towards the others, that has been inoculated to us as a vaccine to future. We will learn from the mistakes from the past disunity, based on ideas above the feelings of love of the others and the environment. At last, we will be capable of recognizing each other in a common future and basic needs to develop and live together.
Once you have gone through an adventure like this: to live and coexist in an environment other than routine and pre-established plans, there are three options. a) To continue the adventure, to postpone the happy ending of the story; typical when the love or the hope of having found the Arcadia that we yearn so much stands in the middle. b) To look for new horizons; keep tied to past debts with ourselves, to continue going on with crazy exploration plans; typical of young Theseus, adventurers eager to know other things and other people, instead of the THING or the OTHER. c) To come back to your prefixed life and turn the page.
The most sensible option for a lot of people is the last one. In the end, if we remember the possible facts to go deeper in the unknown world, when luckily there is no necessity of going away, the main reasons are temporal and personal: to look for the way to a future, to the horizon that it is so known from our home and it will not be the same by the time we get back.
Feeling alive, thanks to living with other different and exciting people, is over. People, with whom you have built a friendship that perhaps the remoteness cools off, but the memory and the heart will maintain. You have to come back home, maybe go back with your family, postponing the real independence that you enjoyed so much and finished so soon. You struggled to settle down in your Arcadia but you come back only to yearn for it. Perhaps you left to run away or to find yourself and you have to come back to the place where you were lost, with no clear direction or destination, to keep bumping around in your monotonous life.
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In postmodern times there is no need to collapse, thinking that life is just limited to youth; to find your other half and the necessary economic and labour stability to follow the cycle of life: to be born, to consume, to reproduce, and to die accustomed, typical in stable historic periods and closed social structures.
Nowadays society, with its almost insolvable crisis, with breakthroughs in the fields of science and intercultural knowledge, consequence of the institutional development, emigration, travel by means of mass transit and telecommunications, has determined a future that can lead us to a new rebirth. For the first time in Human time, we have a real opportunity of writing a worldwide scale History.
If we fail in this attempt (without exaggerations and being aware that the truth lies in the middle and that we should avoid extreme opinions), the opposite will happen soon or later: a new worldwide confrontation, really global, independently if the fuse blows in Europe or in other part of the globe. It will probably be a guerrillas or sects warfare, with less technological display than the one expected, not being a War between countries, axis, unions or civilizations, but among neighbours and brothers that will begin to beat each other. Our failure would be to fail realizing that we all were looking for the same goals in our different ways of understanding the existence on the planet.
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We must not forget well-intentioned ideas from many utopian humans which became in nightmares. Long before Moro, I want to remind the outsider Plato, turned into the excuse and justification for the European ideology to believe that the Truth exists and it is possible to know it. The history of Europe has been for centuries little more than a "footnote" to Plato´s writings about the world of Ideas, the Good and the Truth, which were interpreted and manipulated accordingly.
Plato didn’t like moderate and relative ideas, opposing his master and the sophist Protagoras that said that Humans and not the Truth, was the measure of all things. Fighting this idea, he invented a magic game to make fun of his indolent rival: <<If you say that truth doesn’t exist and you try to make your motto the real one, then, either the truth exists and your sentence is false or the truth doesn’t exist and then your conclusion can’t be the real one>>. If I state that I’m a liar, am I saying the truth?
This apparent gibberish was partly responsible for the exclusive logic of “black or white” which is prevailing in the West countries for centuries. It has become an excuse for totalitarian religions and ideologies to introduce their Truth. The trick of the game is that even if we accept that Truth with capital letters exists, the same as God, its existence doesn’t really mean that small human beings could ever know that Universal and Ideal Truth. For Plato’s displeasure, when he realized this, he would try to lodge that Truth in the world of the Ideas.
Human beings prefer “small truths” we find in our inner soul listened throughout our life. Minor truths, but essential, gathered by popular wisdom from folks and times, like the one that says that “virtue lies in the middle” or the other one that says “extremes of any colour come together and look for the same goals”, just to mention two little examples among the hundreds of them that there could be. These were the reasons by which Protagoras was agnostic. Not only he bestowed the knowledge of Truth but also the knowledge of God, if possible, to intellectual efforts that transcended the human.
Only in the last century, the logic went from imperative to fuzzy and the science expressed the “Uncertainty principle” for which it was impossible to know the full truth of a subatomic particle because only with the fact of observing it, we were vitiating its real position and nature. Human knowledge efforts haven’t been accompanied by the individuals necessity of securities and illusory truths expressed as drastic and, therefore, definitive.
A real psychologist and Humanity philosopher warned and prophesied at the end of the XIX century, in his writings and meditations, where was leading our historical steps, by warning about the danger of mass exclusive religions and ideologies that were appearing. The XX century history could be very well written in the footnotes of the philologist Friedrich Nietzsche’s works.
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This text has tried to be the result of everything I could have ever known, sensed and seen in my short life and in the life of others that see further that today’s nihilism, in which we have to stay considering the beloved collapse, for some people, in History and the imposition of their virtual future. Hopefully, we will manage to face a future in which human race will finally recognize itself as united in this planet and Universe, united in diversity for a common fate and thousands of millions of ways of living it.
Some will grind their teeth when reading opinions that they refuse, not because they don’t like them, but because they could sound familiar to them and they wouldn’t like to assume them as real in the world we are living in. Others will think that I just write under the impulse of pessimism and alarmism, just talking for the sake of it... Hopefully, all of them are right and I’m the one making a mistake in my comments and in my out loud questions, not solutions, I asked here. I only wish that my words are, in fact, out of proportion and false in its negative perspectives. I only wish diversity and understanding are not a Utopia anymore but something positive in the construction of a new age.
What it couldn’t have been created in thousands of years, can’t be created in a few days. What we don’t understand about ourselves and the others, we won’t understand it with miraculous and definitive solutions… If we stop staring (ourselves) and we begin to interact, for the first time, we all of us, except cowards and reactionaries, are able to undo our past and build a new possible future that could be Utopia or disagreement.
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A Europe of Europas can be the opportunity of being what you always dreamt to be and of being respected and even loved for what you are, because you also love the way in which the others want to be. Everybody then, looking for the best way to live, being oneself, by observing and sharing with others... This is quite a real Utopia in the horizon. Can you imagine?