“While they clap themselves silly”: an opinion piece by Lilian Concepción Álvarez

I must have been six or seven. He would have been about seventeen or eighteen. I had seen him several times in the square in my neighbourhood, digging in a flower bed, taking something out and then counting money. Colourful banknotes! Green, pink, tan, blue…

To me, the conclusion was obvious: there was treasure buried there.

So one day, when I saw him digging again, I ran over and started digging beside him with all my might. He looked at me and burst out laughing.

“No, I’m looking for the treasure too.”

That made him laugh even harder. At the time, I couldn’t understand what he found so funny. I was absolutely certain that if I found the treasure, I’d claim my share.

Over the years, I discovered that what that young man kept there wasn’t money, but something that later helped him earn it. And that our idea of “treasure” was quite different.

I suppose growing up means, in part, discovering that many things we take for granted are sometimes not quite what they seem.

The trouble is that getting older doesn’t do much to free us from that habit. We see part of something, guess at the rest, and build ourselves a fairly complete story. Sometimes we get it right. Sometimes we haven’t a clue, but that rarely stops us from giving our opinion with admirable confidence.

Making room for doubt ought to come with age, like grey hair or back pain, but we still like to be certain about who’s who, what happened, why it happened and who was to blame.

Oh yes, blame—that very Catholic invention that ensures there’s always someone to point the finger at. Because while we point at everyone else, we avoid the discomfort of looking within.

Sometimes all it takes is an anecdote, a half-told version, a phrase taken out of context or an intention someone attributes to another person out of nowhere to create a version of them which, through sheer repetition, ends up seeming more real than the person themselves.

My father was very fond of proverbs and used to teach us life lessons with short phrases that stuck in our minds. He often told me one:

“Darling, opinions are like arses: everyone has one.”

And he wasn’t wrong. After all, this is an opinion piece. So here’s mine too.

The tricky part comes when we confuse what we think with what we know.

And then the usual prejudices appear: that they’re coming to invade us, that they’re taking our jobs, that they’re coming to live off handouts…

While we look for someone to blame among those who have even less than we do, we leave alone the people who really can decide what happens to our wages, our rents and the price of things.

And there they are, perfectly happy, cheering themselves silly, while you think your biggest problem is Youssef and Fátima, who risked their lives in a small boat to get here. Not a political and economic class that, curiously, always manages to stay out of the firing line, even when there are months when you have to choose between food, electricity, water and rent.

Perhaps we should ask ourselves whether all those shitty opinions we repeat like a mantra are really so harmless. Whether they have a lot to do with that dehumanisation.

The kind that makes a MP feel entitled to talk about “hunting” people one by one, and allows others to feel entitled to shoot an eight-year-old Moroccan boy in the head with a pellet in Ceuta.

Because, in the end, we keep doing the same thing: we see part of something, fill in the rest and convince ourselves that we know exactly what we’re looking at.

We don’t know the whole story and sometimes we don’t even know half of it. But what does it matter? We’re absolutely certain there’s treasure buried in that flower bed.

And as long as we remain so convinced, we’ll keep digging with all our might.