By Agustín Pérez, Spain.
The old, barely original, slogan, “Stop worrying and enjoy life,” seems to be the favorite message for our government. It could be translated into “relax!, don’t you worry about the crisis, keep on spending, while I watch out for everything.”
This is said rather than meant, for after looking at the growing unemployment statistics, relaxing is but a remote dream. In spite of everything, the unions’ choir also keeps repeating that there is nothing wrong, meaning “stop worrying and enjoy unemployment—if it ends you will get compensation.” Therefore, stay happy, even if jobs come to an end.
On the other hand, following this unique message, enjoying life refers to the mere use of sex, far from the original gaudium (joy), which has a deeper content, and which is defined by the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy as “a sense of satisfaction at owning, remembering, or hoping for, desirable goods or things.”
Of course, it depends on which desirable goods or things you hope for. If one follows the line of the messages proclaimed today—hedonistic and pleasing the senses—those goods involve sheer material immediacy. Only the self and today matter; anything else does not concern me.
To take a rather real situation: if what one hopes for is an outdoor booze session, with enough libation and amid an atmosphere of permissive buddying, and then whatever may come up—this does not seem to be called enjoying life, but rather a different thing, which might not be remembered later due to the hangover. But, just in case, there is the morning-after pill. But then, of course, breaking parental authority and guidance. This way of life, eroticized by an education tinged with ideology, throws joy into a pit called abortion. Here we have a government pervading people’s conscience, setting itself up as a guide and teacher for our teenagers.
In those mouths, the enjoy-life motto adds sarcasm when it refers to an unborn human being, since its chances to live on depend on the lottery of the parents who have begotten it, and on the harassment around women in favor of abortion, instead of offering help to the future mother all the way through delivery and for some time thereafter.
The first step involved manipulating language through plays on words to describe each stage of a human being, even though a human being is one and the same from conception till natural death, whenever it may occur. Once words have been manipulated, cutting a life short has become an insignificant gesture, which remains in people’s unconscious as something just as ordinary as taking a bus. The joy of life, for everyone, is living it with coherence, and facing the future.
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