The Dark Side of Surprise

This week's Camino a Ítaca reminds me that after so many years, Spain can still be a mystery to me. September is in full swing and education is on many people's radars and it is definitely on mine. Combine that with the ongoing pandemia and then throw in a few negationists and you have a potent cocktail. Click over to read the original published in el HOY in Spanish or the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

After living here for so many years, Spain can still surprise me. Time and time again I find myself scratching my head and thinking, ‘Amazing that was completely unexpected.’ Whether this frequent state of bewilderment is a good thing or not, I’m not so sure. It’s wonderful when I come across a new dish in an undiscovered (for me) region, or when I stumble upon wonderfully creepy Romanic capitals on the other side of the Tagus. The sheer depth of uncharted territory for me here offers me several lifetimes’ worth of exploring. The darker side of this disorientation though comes when I’m struck with an occurrence that takes me completely by surprise.

This happened the other week when I heard about the poor little girls that were being used as politicized weapons by their malevolent parents in their infantile battle against reason. The images from abroad of misinformed lunatics injecting themselves with bleach and gargling with iodine in their deluded fight against a disease many claim doesn’t even exist had until then seemed completely foreign.

Spain’s response to the pandemic has been exemplary. The Spanish understand that vaccines work. They are the best line of defense against the disease and the fastest route available to us to be able to return to some sense of normalcy. Draconian lockdowns and the quasilegal imprisonment of our children aside, the measures adopted have been effective. Mask wearing has been taken to an extreme with people having to wear them while walking out in the countryside, but absolutely no one disagrees with the fact that they are the simplest, most effective measure that we can take against contagion indoors. No one at least who has the least minimum notion regarding how viruses are transmitted. My eight-year-old gets it.

But my surprise wasn’t that a few negationist nutcases were trying to impose their selfish whims on the wider community. In fact, until then my surprise was that the extreme right had yet to import and adopt, as they have done with so many other foreign positions, this anti science lunacy. My shock came about when I saw the Junta’s initial reaction and poisonous bile spilt by a large section of the general public towards the teachers, claiming they were lazy and simply did not want to work.

At a time when you can’t even conceive of stepping foot into a public administration building without a previous appointment, the Junta’s initial order to not only allow this family to flaunt the rules, rules that the teachers had been rigorously teaching and implementing for the past two years, and insist that the teachers place themselves and the entire school at risk, simply due to an unfounded caprice, was madness. Just imagine if you try to walk into a court building without a mask. How far would you get in before you are stopped by security guards or the police? But hey, these are just teachers.

Where does this deep contempt for teachers, and what they do, come from? Is it some sort of unconscious hostility that arises from suffering endured at the hands of callous and cruel nuns when they were in school? Or is this disdain based on the fact that many simply consider teachers overpaid babysitters? Whatever it is, it will never cease to perplex me.