Once Upon a Time in a Small Town
I have bad news. Surviving in a small town, while being able to speak publicly, is a challenge that many aspire to but few truly achieve.
The structure of small towns facilitates transparency through rumours. The local leaders who leave behind traces of mismanagement and doubtful accounts within the institutions they pass through. The board chairman who disregards budgetary rules to bolster his image as a local success story. The entrepreneur who distributes money to those who might help him in the future.
Usually, these acts leave traces that are never explicitly acknowledged by those responsible, those tasked with resolving the damage done. Keeping this information from the public, and spreading it only as rumours, keeps in the successor’s hand an ace to be played later. Small towns have become chessboards where personal interests, the pursuit of power, and the illusion of status are gradually built and maintained by masters of the game, with apprentices learning from their mentors—sometimes sacrificing themselves in the process.
Having always lived in a small town with strong ties to nearby villages, I have come to understand how this game develops. To many, small towns sink into silence, perceiving truths as rumours (which can be both true and false at the same time). Protest is often dismissed as madness, and how many times have we seen that? Clairvoyance is considered a privilege reserved for those lucky enough to have grown up as professionals outside these areas, which weighs heavily on the majority. Surviving as someone who can speak out in a small town is a challenge that many aspire to but almost no one truly achieves.
A Long Cycle
Imagine a city where power operates in long cycles. My small town does not like the tides of change, but I suspect it’s not much different from many others. A tide that rises and falls, can be predictable to an extent, yet always disturbs what remains still. In one moment you need to breathe and, suddenly, you must learn to swim and endure underwater. Sands and stones shift with the ocean’s force; nothing remains constant, and the weight of things varies with the state of the sea.
In small towns, long cycles give us a certain predictability that ultimately pleases everyone. Those who hold the executive power. Those with influence over others, often positioning themselves as vital forces (vital usually meaning money). Those who professionalize in protests, relieved of responsibility, no matter how small, and those who prefer to operate from the outside.
When this predictability begins to unravel, we rarely understand it by analysing the masses. I cannot adopt a Marxist perspective here, unfortunately. Small towns force us to develop theories for territories that large-scale tendencies have not yet fully grasped. The focus often falls on who facilitates or finances this cycle of decline. Some actors are dedicated to national scenes, investing alongside even more powerful figures, sharing smiles in halls where they learn how to apply the rules of the big world to their local lands. Others believe that power begins from the ground up, building their territory through the conviction that they have something to teach the world. In their ignorance and arrogance, they follow paths many others have taken throughout history, failing to reach the true meaning of originality. Due to the small size of the town, these works, even though kept secret, are very easy to catch and see.
A Broken Promise
The masses have been retained in an logic of hope and redemption to come, clinging to promises that are often never fulfilled. Since the April 1974 Revolution, living conditions have improved to unimaginable levels. Any time traveler would be amazed. Yet, humanity doesn’t travel through time, it lives in the process of unfolding history, which evolves notions of comfort, ambition, and desire.
Within a long cycle, it’s very difficult to develop responses that account for these societal transformations, especially since these cycles rarely recognise that the world is changing beyond their bureaucratic procedures. What has, and still does, weigh heavily on the masses is the fact that promises of transformation originate from the same circles where current power resides. The idea of democratic turnover has never truly been compatible with entrenched power. Without societal change, there is no promise worth buying into, only aspirations that remain unfulfilled.
It is at this crossroads that we now find ourselves. Know this: the change can be in vain. We are resentful, resentful for never having found a way to turn things in our favor. But this resentment is collective, not individual. And it is this collective that today demonstrates the greatest capacity for distancing itself from reality. We drink in frustration from every direction we look and think, reinforcing both a compulsive need to, facing an inability to build, become beings driven toward destruction.
I do not believe that large cycles are self-renewing, just as I do not believe in solutions that follow the same logic, the same deference to voices of command, the same pseudo-democratic traps into which small towns sink. Nor do I believe that projects aimed at the mass destruction of democratic structures, funded by the very forces that have sustained the power network since the founding of our democracy, can bring anything good. Sand in the eyes—who does that satisfy? I believe we will all need to make a greater effort to truly understand, again and again, what those around us are saying. There are no easy solutions for those who insist on making everything easier.