Vulnerability
Unusual days, the ones we have to live. Isolated at home, we feel that we are immersed in a strange and unreal reality. The applause for the health personnel links us with unknown neighbors who applaud from balconies and windows. A friend hit the nail on the head when, communicating on WhatsApp the emotion caused by these applauses, she wrote: “… and what a sudden love for the neighbors in the block across the street!”. Recreating within us this feeling of unity and affection between neighbors gives us strength to face the complexity of the situation: overflowing hospital workers, casuistry of lost jobs, closings and layoffs, boys and girls who ask to go out, old people who need support, awareness of the inequality based on the square meters in which we are confined, political disagreements
Perhaps we will learn that the radical individual and collective vulnerability, now in the nude, is not something conjunctural but a characteristic of the human being from which it is possible to extract consequences for life and for public policies. That assuming it coherently would lead to other types of attitudes and priorities: to policies oriented not to blind growth and dominating supremacy, but to planning the centrality of care; to strengthening global governance; to the generous welcome of the Other who, tomorrow, today, can be me on a border; in short, to pragmatically translate into political action that we are an interdependent humanity inhabiting a common planet.
Originally written in Spanish by Carmen Magallón (WILPF Spain) and published in Heraldo de Aragón at 17th March 2020.