Family

These weeks waiting in Barcelona have been everything but relaxed. The mediterranean culture promotes a 24 hours public-relations-way-of-life. It is difficult to consider being with yourself for two hours or more, just reading or thinking about whatever you want: at any moment will call you someone insisting when you can meet him-her-them to eat or drink something. Chating and eating are an obsession. It seems impossible to avoid it and I can assure that the problem is not if I'm or if im not a very well positioned person in the society. I talked with several friends and other people and almost everyone confirmed me that that is the way to live here. My feelings say that this gregarious behaviour maybe is a consequence of several centuries suffering a catholic family tradition.

I thaught a lot about it when I read two weeks ago an article from the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung about the annual Congress of the Green party and the debate they organized concerning its political programm for families. It was very interesting because the Greens still consider the family a negative entity because the way it can repress the individual. You can not properly develope your behaviour and personality if you live very close to the family.

This idea was in fact an opposition to my family concept. For me, one of the few things that the Mediterranean culture can offer to the developement of the world was this concept of family unity. But I have changed in many senses my point of view, mainly because I spent more than three years in Germany and I expierenced important things:

1, the Catholic tradition doesn't help the person to develope freely his personality. On the contrary, the big majoriy of countries with protestant roots force young people to find por su cuenta their lifes.

2, the family is normally the main base of a society when this society is underdeveloped. A rich country with a healthy State offers to every citizen an option to explode the best of his/her personality.

From the end of the monarchy and until the uprising of the communism, the family was in China the unique safe communuty that a chinese could have. Now the increasing opportunities to become a middle-class citizen moving to the cities and abroad divide the unity of the families and also its power. But China is still a country in developement. James Fallow wrote last december on the Atlantic Monthly : "People dont trust others outside the family. They dont trust the internet, or doctors. Or the mobile phone company to bill them honestly. Or, of course, the government. Building a company beyond the family scale requires many layers of trust..."

C.