Gods and Civil Servants

Stability or ... much needed change.
The next stop on the Camino a Ítaca...civil servants and premature death. Read the original Spanish version here or the English below.

The frayed, red and white plastic tape spun around in the wind, cordoning off the area like a crime scene. Large blocks of faded plastic lay like bleached whalebones poking out of the sand on some remote beach. Then there was the silence. Streets and squares, normally so full of life, were reduced to leaves blowing under empty swings that shifted in the breeze.

The empty, cordoned off children’s playgrounds during the lockdown is one of the pandemic scenes that I will never forget. The hollow squares next to them, with their chained up plastic tables and chairs, looked like just another quiet Sunday morning but the red and white tape strung between the lampposts was a potent symbol of something very, very wrong.

Children’s parks here in Spain have always intrigued me. In a country that is so child-friendly, I always have always wondered why the majority of children’s parks are so poorly equipped. It often seems as though they are urban planning afterthoughts, acting solely as a complement to the adjoining terraces that do bring in some money to the town hall’s coffers. Yet under the lockdown, one lie empty while the other simply ceased to exist.

The rather morbid image brought to mind that, much in the same way that gods reflect their creators, parks too reflect those that bring them into existence. They are both products of people’s desires, fears and prejudices and both bear the indelible stamp of those that create them.

Their inspiration also comes from parallel sources. Divine inspiration has been known to reveal golden plates to con men in places like New York state, but it almost invariably seeks out poor and illiterate souls living in wretched conditions for its immutable message. Messages that demand unquestioning faith and the occasional genocide in return for questionable future promises.

The inspiration to build parks, in contrast, comes from a more earthly though not altogether less conceited source. One that also has the habit of making questionable future promises. Politicians make promises to their flock, but it’s the civil servants that make them a reality. Public servants that also live in a wretched state.

Blasphemy some may say. After all, the myth of the carefree civil servant is almost as potent and ingrained as that of people rising from the dead, but is it necessarily true?

Once the poor souls have memorized their temarios, regurgitated them and passed go to collect their posts, funcionarios are also damned to live under a system that is as ridged and unforgiving as the harshest interpretations of scripture. They find themselves managed by rules that few really understand and find that, no matter what they do or even how well they do it, the rewards are metaphysical at best.

This stifling structure is reflected in the parks’ design. The kids have few risks to manage and take, no real opportunity to move from one stage to the next. It’s safe, sterile and like the public corps, a premature graveyard of whalebones and ideas.

During this temporary truce with the disease, kids have returned to the parks. Even if they are no zip lines or natural spaces, they still manage to create and to figure out a way to have fun despite the controlled environment. Symbols that even the hardest held myths can be overcome.