Not like

I vividly remember one of the first tv documentaries that sought to portray the day-to-day life in Portugal under a bail-out regime, broadcasted at a late hour, well after prime time.

This will have been in early 2011 and whereas one could argue that the preceding nearly 3 full years of what was then still regarded a financial crisis, in itself would provide sufficient material for in.depth reports, it is rather proper to Portugal that the country first needs to formalise and document the fact that a crisis had set and that was the signing of the memorandum of understanding by government and oppostion political parties on the domestic end and the creditors of IMF, EU and ECB, referred to as troika.

At the time, most people still hardly had a notion of what national austerity meant or would come to imply for them and their surroundings and the general image a population had of "troika" was what came as something being domestically disputed inside and in front of the Greek parliament.  The general concern,, in Portugal, then was whether what was referred to as crisis would persists for 2 or 3 years.

In this documentary, somewhere in a village, a woman explained how on a regular basis she would sneak out of her house in the middle of the night in order to go and wash the clothes of her two teenager daughters in a nearby river.  She had a washing machine at home but not the cash-flow to operate it.  Teenage daughters will need their favourite clothes every day and certainly do not need a feeling of embarresement.  I was very impressed and disturbed with seeing a pragmatic person, weakened but determant to safeguard her children from the distress of some outside world.

Two years later, this past Saturday, an estimated 10 % of the population adhered to a social networked invitation to parade in various cities country wide with quite a "not like" list against the government, politicians, policies or the lack of policies, the troika committee and even against some of the countries that tend to have a greater weight in international organizations.

Amongst the demonstrants there will have been quite a few people with tragic stories to tell and, again, I was impressed, more so by the country wide organization, the size and particularly the variety of participants, young and old, employed or not, educated or not, room for some carnavalestic irony, all wrapped in the peaceful almost patriotic manner that has indeed distinguished the Portuguese popular protesting in the past months.

The big question on "what's next" remains and I believe it would be wrong to suggest people would look for some sort of return to medieval forms of popular hangings or jubelations under some king's balcony on a central square.  It would be naive to expect any concrete proposals from a revolted population towards an office holding government.

It will be a matter of time, years, maybe just months, for the perceived intrusions and intruders of what were reasonably comfortable but above all self-controlled lives, to be named and to be attributed a common unique identification and at that point some form of organized civil movements, political or not, will appear, also in Portugal.

Surely and not that slowly it is becoming rather evident that private individuals, occassionally grouped or not, do learn faster than governments do and that says something about the path ahead.