With the reflective vests as if they were operators hired by the old PER in the work of a voyage, the slogans in handwriting and the leisurely walk among those who cross with haste, I meet them many days in the Plaza de Las Tendillas. They wear to identify a name that Cordoba has a bit of the grotesque, as if in the city, and throughout Andalusia, had ever used another word that the noble "grandfather" and "grandmother." Other times they put behind placards with acronyms of unions to which perhaps they did not belong when they worked and shout that they have to raise the pensions without realizing that those who have put the placards and the colors probably take more chub if they finish for getting away with it.
Whoever wants to see them with indulgence will think, and will be right many times, that those hands worn out by the work and those eyes that lost sharpness one year after another in endless days supported theirs, squeezed pennies from pensions so that from there the soup and the shirts of the families of their unemployed children came out, and that was so few years ago that it was as if it were yesterday. There are, however, in those manifestations that are seen in Cordoba, something that bothers even modesty, and is the feeling that many of the people who come, sometimes with the best will, are cheating or at least they use them to serve as spearhead. At times they look like cannon fodder that will not stay lying in the square or pick up the shrapnel so that it does not reach the generals, but it will do the job of wearing down the enemy and of making a bulge in the photos so that later others conquer more money for the union, some seats in a chamber of representation and a flattering air of revolution in social networks.
In exchange for the dream that they will collect a well-deserved improvement in the pension, they march behind the banners like little ants in an army that will perhaps serve to raise one percent a day, but above all it is used for some politicians to teach the clamor of the street, the news of the TV open the news with the social fracture and those who are close to their pass the chat dish in front of the microphones. Although many have turned seventy they will not have noticed, and if they have fallen into it they will have set it aside as they remove the errors of memory, that they could not celebrate abortion as a social conquest for their daughters and then lament that there are fewer young people to quote and feed the pensions they enjoy, so they are shamelessly subscribed to the magical thought of planting ten-cent coins to produce five-euro bills.
These, and those who say they worked a lot as if those of us now got up every day at the Angelus and we went to take vermouth, almost compensate with those, more candid, who throw a cable to the demagogy of Stop Evictions when they paid their homes with interest of 15.5% and without leaving a letter. They deserve that the pensions be raised and that a system that goes right to the collapse be fixed without prejudices nor red lines, but who was going to say to them that to them years they were going to make of shock troop. It seems that the topic that old age always leads to wisdom and wisdom should be reviewed.
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