i have been racking my brains: what’s so different here in stockholm? why does the concrete feel so human? why do the humans feel so different? why is there such a sense of purpose — even when the purpose is not to be all that purposeful?
what does make it happen, after all? something tangible, i ask myself. something i can point to and show you how.
and so i realise, just now, two things which become quite clear for me. one i experienced one summer, decades ago in the northern spanish city of burgos: a continental climate and hot even 800 metres up. at least during the day. so everyone left the city in summer: to climes where you didn’t survive the weather but could thrive instead. the seaside, maybe. yep. there for example.
but i had to stay behind for work that july. and suddenly i had this sense of being at one with my environment. what was it? what was different? what had changed?
it was easy once i tumbled to it: everyone had taken their cars with them. not just that they weren’t there to drive them around: the cars themselves weren’t there to intervene in the visual landscape, and distract and divert and impact on your psyche, even when only subliminally; and then again, even hurt some of us because of a still undiscussed neurodiversity … and all as a result of their deliberately engineered capacity to attract our attention inescapably with covert ingenuity.
here, today, then, in central stockholm, there are two things which tangibly make me feel at home. the first is an absence; the second being a presence.
the absence, first:
- no cars. very few anyways. no need for cars. just people using their legs. do you remember legs? remember what that was about? no. not the clutch and the accelerator. the pavement and the kerb and walking the line … and the dance.
the presence, second:
- so many young people and children and elderly and other. and a young man with a boom-box, and then the coffee-drinkers on the terrace across the road smiling in recognition of their own youth, perhaps; and smiling, all the same.
- and then bikes galore and bio-diesel buses, and trams and stuff, and within five minutes walk an underground and a commuter-train network.
so: this is purposeful living which liberates not suffocates. and don’t believe the anglo-saxon right-wing when they say sweden equals “smotherland”. what they say when they do … it’s utter bollocks.
more than any country i’ve been to, this is an intellectually, emotionally and socioeconomically free society. even today. even after everything we’ve all been through. even after what they think they have lost to a better past.
imperfections? for sure.
on the scale of other countries flaws and injustices? no way, josé.
just one example from the uk to illustrate. many years ago, foodbanks arrived to ameliorate real pain. a conservative minister even praised the fact: community coming together. she (i think she was a she but she only voiced what all her party, mainly men, also preferred to assert) … well … she could’ve said how terrible that they were needed in the first place. but she didn’t.
last year in the uk of johnson & co, it was warm-banks for those who couldn’t afford both food and central-heating.
and so this year, gordon brown, the ex-british prime minister, informs us of hygiene-banks: for those in the uk who already share toothbrushes, can’t buy toothpaste, and who find that sanitary products for women just ain’t something they can contemplate:
so DON’T tell me “smotherland” EVER again, when you discuss the fact of sweden and its ways of seeing and doing stuff. because if you do, if you dare to, you just really have no idea what you’re saying … no idea whatsoever.
and that’s a tangible fact for sure.
as tangible as the weekly death tolls that add up year after year, at the hands of the gun-holders who terrorise good american citizens in the name of spurious constitutional rights.
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