Nobody Expects the Spanish Revolution
Although I’ve sorely neglected this blog in the last half year, due to a great deal of travel to Berlin, France and California, I certainly can’t let what’s happening in Spain go by without comment. So here are excerpts of an Email I sent to my dear ones abroad, interspersed with photos I took Sunday (election day in Spain) of the sit-in at the Puerta del Sol. You can see (thanks to L.) two amazing panoramic shots here. 
As I’m pretty tapped into the green/anarchist left-wing in Madrid, I received the original call for a protest march for May 15th. That happened to be the last day of the DocumentaMadrid film festival (when they show the prize-winning films) and I had three cinema sessions planned plus an urban garden awaiting tomato plants that I’d germinated in my garden. So I said to myself (especially in the wake of May Day), “yeah, yeah, just another demo that won’t amount to anything”, and didn’t go. The next day of course I heard the demonstrators had camped out that night at Sol but again I said to myself that it won’t last. On Tuesday evening given that it wasn’t going away, I got my butt over there and really there were a lot of people, possibly a thousand with constant turn-over of thousands more because it’s the exact center of town so one can go by, then go about one’s business then easily circle back around. 
Wednesday night I saw somewhat more participants but roughly double the police presence compared to Tuesday and I thought to myself, uh-oh. But even now, they still haven’t been thrown out of the square (I think the políticos originally didn’t dare given the proximity of the elections, but now I’m a bit surprised they’re still there). It poured buckets Thursday; the protestors were not deterred. By Friday night at midnight when they scheduled a moment of silence as the start to the Spanish “Day of Reflection” prior to the Sunday elections, Sol was totally packed. There was no way I could get in, and all the side streets (I think there are 10) leading to the square were packed to at least a half a block away. The police presence was much less than I’d seen either of the previous days, with them in a butt-scratching, putting-in-overtime sort of mood. So the vibe was, needless to say, super good, and the media had finally stopped saying it was only youth as frankly large sectors of society were out there.
This Sunday during the elections I was there again and it’s well-organized, with political meetings going on constantly with different themes in various side streets and the center of the square covered in tarps for several hundred people to camp out overnight. Today and the two previous days the temperatures have approached or exceeded 30°C; the protesters have not been deterred. However, all of us are discouraged by the elections (the privatization-crazy right has swept the regional elections across the country). The results were a terrible shock though not a surprise; the country is sadly well on its way down the slippery slide to a bi-party system and a protest vote means of necessity choosing the opposite party, no matter how awful it is, similar to what happens in the U.S.
So what does it all mean? Spain is special in many ways (underdeveloped but developing too quickly and at times simply not very European, facts about which the Spanish have a total inferiority complex). Democratic traditions are tentative and new (it’s important to remember there have been only 35 yrs of democracy, prior to which there was no right to associate — it was forbidden — meaning my little NGO could not have existed if I had immigrated to Spain in the mid-1970s). To go to Sol and see democracy being played out in the street (using a consensus process) is quite stirring. The other perspective I can add has to do with how groups organize themselves communally. Honestly, I have never lived in a country that is so communitarian; it’s the key to the very cool Tabacalera self-run (auto-gestionado) community cultural center that some of you who’ve visited me have come to know. After some two and a half years here, I think I can say it’s the thing I most admire about this country.
