To understand the bitter taste I felt after visiting Argentina, my home country, you have to have lived abroad for many years, especially because I went there hoping that the global disease wasn't as advanced there as it is here in Europe. Distressed at not being able to find a healthy place to live in Spain, where I've lived for fifteen years, a peaceful place with a bit of nature, I thought, as expected, I'd have better luck in Patagonia.
Last summer (winter there), 2016, my wife and I boarded a plane, rested from the flight for a couple of days in Buenos Aires, and then boarded the bus that took us to El Bolsón, a town in the province of Río Negro that I'd never visited before. When we arrived, it was raining (we later learned it wasn't going to stop), so we took shelter in a bar and called the people who would rent us a cabin, whom we had contacted previously from Buenos Aires. The owner of the cabins came out to pick us up in her car. As we were climbing (the town is nestled between hills, I suppose that's where its name comes from), this typical porteña (porteño: from the capital of Argentina), who even if left alone in the middle of the Sahara would still give the impression that she always has something more important to do than what she's doing now, was quick to clarify that many of her clients were disappointed by not finding enough recreational activities. “Because they're idiots!”, I responded promptly. It's well known that the average tourist expects to enjoy beautiful views of nature from the window of a hotel with a discotheque, casino, massage room, sauna, and heated pool. Trying to put her in our perspective, I explained what we were escaping from. I told her we lived in a mountain neighborhood, right next to a natural park, which in theory should be a peaceful place. However, the highway through the city center, all-terrain vehicles and dirt bikes, chainsaws, cultivators, lawnmowers, alarm dogs, wild boar hunts, amplified folk festivals heard from France, etc., have all contributed to the opposite effect. She didn't respond, nor did she during our stay in her cabin, and with good reason; after the many kilometers of plane and bus travel we'd traveled, we found exactly what we'd left behind. And if we were able to rest relatively calmly, it was because, except for a couple of clear days that allowed us to walk around and explore the area, it rained torrentially from the moment we arrived until we left. A relevant fact: according to her, she confirmed what I already suspected: rain replaced snow; not so many years ago, it snowed in El Bolsón. Guess why the climate changed? During our stay in her cabins, I touched on this subject several times while chatting with our host, who continued to bite her tongue until the day we left, when she had nothing left to lose (for common people this means only money) and finally declared her way of thinking. Her argument was exactly the same one used in Spain to justify deforestation: the danger of fire. “I can't risk losing my investment,” she said. Given that she was an intelligent and cultured girl, I could have “reminded” her (information available to anyone these days) that knowing what photosynthesis consists of is enough to deduce that deforestation is the main cause of the greenhouse effect, of which it's known that one of its consequences is precisely to aggravate the danger of forest fires. I refrained from arguing because I'm also clear that brainwashing and psychological denial turn even the most intelligent into fools. Besides, it's obvious that these people didn't move to Patagonia looking for nature and tranquility, like so many other porteños who went there to “do business.” This woman didn't leave Buenos Aires, she carried it in her backpack: four cars, motorcycles, five dogs, five smartphones, alarms in each house and a car constantly beeping, eighty streetlights on all night… The only vice she apparently gave up was cigarettes, not for her own health or that of her children, but also to protect her investment (from fires.) One of the cabins she offered us was a semi-detached one, that with the thin wooden walls they are made you see the picture: in a small town surrounded by miles of nothing, listening to your neighbor's conversations! That's the state of El Bolsón; anyone who doesn't cut down every last tree to exploit the land does so to cover every last square meter with tourist cabins, and what isn't a garden or cabins is a shantytown. In addition to the dogs (where I live now, each house has three; in El Bolsón, there were fifteen in each house), it's also worth mentioning the tero, a typical bird of the Argentine Pampas. As a child, I used to see them in the middle of the countryside, from the top of the car when we went on vacation with my parents. If we stopped to rest on the side of the road, they wouldn't come closer than fifty meters. Nowadays, what happens in El Bolsón with this creature is what happens in Barcelona with seagulls, pigeons, and, more recently, the unbearable Argentine parrot; it's become a plague, a city rat. It's as big as a seagull and screeches constantly like the Argentine parrot because like the latter it's also territorial, so walking through the streets of El Bolsón means putting up with, in addition to the dogfight, three or four of these creatures standing on every corner like a housewife at the door of a protected tenement.
In short, a place that not so many years ago was a paradise today offers no better quality of life than a neighborhood in downtown Buenos Aires. And according to what we were told, in the summer it's so crowded that you have to wait in line at the supermarket, we're talking about a superstore of those which occupy a whole block, and not just one, there were two right next to each other on the road in the middle of town. When El Bolsón is no longer a tourist attraction, the investors who have the money will repeat the devastation in another town. Those who don't will be left banging their drums with the picketers in the plaza, blaming the government for their misfortune (a concert we had to endure several of the nights we spent there, by the way).
Some might say it was foolish to expect peace and quiet in a tourist spot. We had considered avoiding resorts like the city of Bariloche, but since we didn't have a car, we couldn't risk ending up somewhere too remote. Likewise, these speculations are purely theoretical; after miles and miles of nothingness, you end up in a town of barely twenty blocks, with all the houses crammed together on the side of the road, each with five dogs, down to the last felled tree, and no one travels more than five meters without their butt in the car. Result? The only one who could live peacefully in Patagonia is Benetton, of course, if he lived there, which I doubt.
As it happens all over the world. The fault lies in the human brain.
Nature, tranquility, and privacy, three essential elements for a healthy life, a luxury that soon not even a millionaire will be able to afford. That's how intelligent man is. And now they want to go to Mars. I'd pack them all into a spaceship and send them to Mars, MORONS! Especially those who thinking only about money they're consider themselves realists, pragmatists. They would learn once and for all where wealth is. Our health, our lives, depend on nature. Any speculation, life plan, or business that isn't built on this long-term foundation is doomed to failure.
Without going into detail about what I observed in the people I met again after so many years in Buenos Aires (I was also a porteño), I'll try to wrap this up. As a young man, I only formally understood how the family was being dismembered by modern life; I didn't grasp the seriousness of the problem. I vaguely remember (which is why I can't cite) American sociologists discussing this issue, a problem that the United States, the current cultural parent of most of the world, has accepted for decades. I looked askance at these arguments because I wasn't interested in idealizing the concept either. Today, I see with complete clarity (it helps that the problem has worsened, as expected) how the family has been reduced to a formal contract, where a pair of adults assume political and economic obligations toward their children. Four walls, one roof, the car Dad uses to get to work, another Mom uses to get to hers, and a family one to take the kids to school or, failing that, to the in-laws' house, where the television is on to sit them in front of it. The “home” wouldn't be complete without pets. The car also serves to take the three or more dogs to the park two blocks away; the rest of the day, they're left alone at home barking at the neighbors. Coexistence and communication are limited to combining schedules with WhatsApp. Now, this works in so-called “developed” countries, but in South America, for example, the effect of this culture is even more devastating. That longed-for American Way of Life is a Santa Claus who never arrives, or who passes by. Why do these countries never “develop”? Because they're lazy and corrupt? Lazy and corrupt people exist everywhere in the world. That's what economics and politics were invented for. The reason they'll never fully develop is because the system itself is corrupt at its core. It's fundamentally unsustainable. No lie is sustainable. All these people in underdeveloped countries live and die yearning for this supposed “quality of life,” sacrificing their true wealth and values (the family in South America is similarly crippled) in pursuit of a fictitious goal. Before the system itself, what's corrupt is the very people who allow themselves to be fooled by trinkets. Ultimately, the “system” is made and maintained by all of us.
Yesterday I watched a documentary made by a Russian about the life of a little girl in North Korea, and honestly, I don't feel any more sorry for this little girl than I do for the rest of the children and adults in the world.
©2019 - Walter Alejandro Iglesias