The Eleventh Blog Of Trig - Footsteps on the Moon

I walk out of class on Wednesday the 20^th July, after what I consider to be the best lesson I have taught so far, and find that while I have been teaching, the people of Barcelona have converged in the streets to protest the ‘financial crisis’; the greatest theft in the history of mankind. I can't go home as I intended. I have to join the procession. 

I march through the streets looking around me with a smile. After a while I try to take some photos but my phone is dead, so I sit down for a coffee and plug it into my laptop. This is where I write from now. I don’t know how many people are marching past me now as I write this, but the street has been flowing full of people since well before I sat down. As with the London protests, I can not see the beginning or the end of the procession of people. I can only see the flow, which is steady and unceasing, reminding me of the rivers that washed through the streets during the heavy rainfall this week.

The noise of whistles fills the air like the screech of a football stadium, but this is different. These whistles have purpose. They are blown to the rhythm of the chanting that accompanies them. They synchronise with the drums that beat out the indignation of the Spanish people, of Earth’s people, at having their lives spat on with such disregard by those with power. A banner waves a giant hand with it’s middle finger clearly raised. The Spanish and Catalan people chant words which I recognise from Youtube videos: they sing, “They don’t, they don’t, they don’t rep-re-sent us! They don’t, they don’t, they don’t rep-re-sent us!” They speak of the politicians, and they are right, they don’t.

After twenty minutes or so I am half way through my small 4 Euro(!) coffee, and a largely built man in plain clothes with an earpiece hovers around me. It is obvious he is undercover police, wondering what I am doing on my laptop in the middle of this rabble of smiling 'terrorists', typing away so frantically. He isn’t very inconspicuous. The crowds start to thin out and I consider packing up and moving off after them, but then a new wave floods through the area and the chanting is renewed. Then, slowly, the streets return to their usual shopper + tourist bustle. Behind the protesters heavily armoured police vans crawl slowly and menacingly. Their drivers have balaclavas on…time for me to leave my coffee and catch up with the people.

By the time I catch up with the crowds they have been stopped outside Estacio De Franca (where I type now) by rows of heavily armoured, handgun-armed police. For a hundred metres in front of the barricade the protesters all sit down in the middle of the street. A car up front with a megaphone shouts messages to the crowd and they cheer and whistle in approval. I move up to the front and check out the riot police. A pretty girl walks up their lines smiling at them and offering her lollipop. They shake their heads without a word. I get the feeling many of them would love to take her up on her offer, and would jump at the chance in any other circumstances. What a sad world. I am reminded of the soldiers in world war 1 ceasing fire to play football and exchange presents on Christmas day, before going back to their lines to kill each other.

Fuck the police. I want the police to chant that with us, “FUCK THE POLICE”, and join the people, as people they themselves are.

I have been desperately trying to charge my phone off of my laptop at every safe opportunity I get to sit down, plug it in and type, but it is not easy. I move into the station and see seats. I am very aware of how I appear. There are security men walking round the station with sniffer dogs, eyeing me suspiciously as I sit down, get my laptop out, plug it into my mobile phone, and start typing frantically. I wonder if they are thinking, “is this some kind of hacker here to tap into our station and cause havoc? Is he setting bombs to go off? What is he doing?” I get my notes out, stick my pen in my mouth and get on with what I am doing. When I think my phone is charged enough to take some photos I’ll move back to my notepad and go back out, but for now this is perfect. I can still hear the crowds outside. I can still hear the lady with the megaphone talking in Spanish about how we have all been ripped off. I wish I could speak Spanish so I could tell them my angle on it all; ‘the biggest ‘Ponzi scheme’ in the world’; 'the biggest theft in the history of the world'; 'the biggest load of bullshit believed by the biggest number of people in the world, ever'. The protests are here to show people where they might find truth.

I check the clock and it is 21.34. Suddenly the crowd outside erupts into applause and cheering. I feel I am missing out, but I must wait a little longer so I have enough battery to take some photos. I feel a little bit uncomfortable, knowing that I have lots of work to do, but there is always time. It’s amazing what little sleep you can survive on when you need to, and I have plenty of experience of that, more than I can remember. I check my phone but it still doesn’t look very charged. Time to give it a try. I’ll be back soon.

My mobile works long enough to get some video footage of the riot police and some shots of the protesters, and then it's time for me to go home, cook dinner, maybe get some work done, and then to bed for some much needed sleep. As I walk back along the route that I took with the protesters earlier, I see that the signs they taped to the buildings on their way down are already gone. The banks seemed to have had men at the ready with soap and water to remove the graffiti daubed on their walls and windows. The physical evidence of the protest has been erased in the blink of an eye, but the footprints find no disturbance in my memory, or the memory of those who witnessed it, participated in it. Soap and water cannot remove this. These footprints remain, like a trail through a dark forest, reminding us that others have come this way before, smiling and fearless, passing through unscathed to look back and find the path behind them a little bit more defined, a little more pronounced, and as more and more people tread the path, encouraged by those brave feet that have cleared the way, the wider it becomes. As it widens it accommodates and encourages more travellers. They look down the path, venture down it, reassured by the parties of brave smiling people returning from hacking their way through the forest of the unknown, uncovering the path of truth as they go.


This is "The Eleventh Blog Of Trig", signing off.


(P.S. My phone and laptop got stolen a few days later, with all the pictures and footage of the event...)