Spanish Diary
Day 17?
Every night at 8pm people take to their windows or balconies and participate in one of the few, if not the only, collective physical activity we are allowed: clapping for the nation’s medical workers, literally sacrificing themselves to save lives in overburdened, underfunded hospitals. The first night it happened was the day the government officially announced the state of emergency and our forced confinement. The first thought that came to my mind was to wonder how that had been coordinated. Everyone in the country doing the same exact thing at the same exact time for the same reason? Wow. As a non user of Facebook and all its apps I wondered if maybe this had been in the works for days and I just didn’t know. Even so, though it was for a laudable reason, my natural suspicion of anything so socially massive triggered alarm bells. Yes, maybe I’ve read too much dystopian Sci-Fi, but the way I see it we could be herded into clapping for war just as easily as for doctors. All we need is the right narrative.
A few days later I found myself indignantly calling the police to report “unusual social activity” according to my interpretation of the law establishing obligatory confinement. While I was on the phone, asking for the police to send patrol cars, in the back of my mind I found myself asking myself what I had become. I brushed it off and even now find myself accusingly looking at people walking in the street, sure of their guilt and wanting to play my part in enforcing the law by reporting them and having them somehow punished or admonished.
How quickly the inner totalitarian can come out with the right narrative. How easily we can all submit completely and relish the opportunity to turn our neighbors in to the authorities, convinced of our moral need to do so. I still wonder how the 8pm clapping ritual was organized and every night I worry just a little more at someone else, with very different justifications than providing doctors and nurses with moral support, seeing how easy and how effective that sort of thing can be. Not to mention the opportunities the social media companies, whose apps provide the platform for this massive social herding to be organized, will find when analyzing the troves of data this all provides.
