Kidnappers of People, Ideas and Institutions

Some time ago, those of us who are independentists born under –ahem– democracy would ask ourselves what it must be like to get up in the morning and find yourself in a state that wasn’t an obstacle. What must it be like to have identification that identified you, for example, or to carry out formalities with your own state, in your own language; or even to have entertainment, a coffee or a proper trial in your country’s own language? These are things that the citizens of a normal country never have to ask themselves, and such questions might even surprise them: if you’ve never felt discrimination, how can you know what it tastes like?
In the 21st century, we Catalans born under democracy could only imagine ourselves gaining new rights. We were EU citizens, and we all thought we could only move forward; those were the rules. Well, ha. Today, besides asking ourselves what the things in the first paragraph must feel like, we ask ourselves what it must be like to get up in the morning and not have to worry about the prisoners and the institutions kidnapped by a state undergoing a neo-Francoist involution. Or, we simply ask ourselves what it must be like to be able to express our disagreement with those kidnappers –of people, ideas, institutions– with a street protest, a joke, a rap song, an article, without worrying you’ll be denounced, investigated, imprisoned by a regime where the separation of powers narrows just to teach a lesson to dissidents like you. What must it feel like for your parents and grandparents not to have to say: “look out, this is what happened under Franco”? Grandparents and parents like mine, frightened by the parents and grandparents of today’s kidnappers, who worry when they find out I’m writing articles like this one in case they have to stop reading me one day– and not of my own volition. These are strange times: one day you wake up wondering what it would be like to see a new film subtitled in the language of your country, and the next you wonder if your basic rights are guaranteed.