Having lived in the nation’s capital for the past three years, I can safely say I am in the running for being one of the most non-politically involved citizens in Washington, DC. From dodging both the College Democrats and College Republicans campus club organizations to regretfully informing my friends that I coincidentally have WAY too much homework to watch the State of the Union address every year, and even getting through the Georgetown University Student Association (GUSA) yearly student body campaign elections without so much as a vote, I would say I have done a pretty good job of scraping by the minimum amount of knowledge needed for any political debate. What’s the minimum, you ask? Well, learning about the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, is my version of the least I need to know about politics. And why, you ask? Simple. Being a Health Care Management and Policy major at Georgetown, my professors require this much knowledge of politics to pass their final exams each semester.
When speaking to former study abroad students about what to expect from my semester in Spain, many told me that I would need to begin reading El Pais, the Spanish newspaper, because Spaniards are extremely politically informed, on both the national and international level, and they enjoy expressing their political beliefs in a group setting whenever possible. Unfortunately, my division from this hot button topic derived from this very thought process: I did not like expressing my political beliefs, not because I thought they were incorrect by any means, but because I think that my political beliefs are much like my religious ones—my own and things I believe in and don’t need to defend or justify to others. No one should be able to tell me my personal beliefs are wrong, for whatever reason, and in my opinion, a political debate will not sway my personal decision of what political party I reside with—so why bother? Don’t get me wrong, I think political discussions are entirely too fruitful and teach us about the role of civic society, personal duty, and national history on a level far beyond my comprehension. Yet, most political “discussions” often turn into debates, and for this, I have little patience.
So, coming to Spain was difficult on various levels, and this only added to the pressure I felt from others to know more about the current political environment of my country. After all, I was a personal ambassador of the United States of America (bet no one tells you that when you go on your spring break vacation to Cancun, Mexico). At the Universidad Complutense in Madrid (UCM), I also attend two classes in the Department of Political Sciences and Sociology (political atmosphere: liberal) at a satellite campus known as Somosaguas, which is also home to the Department of Law (political atmosphere: conservative), which seemed to further the need to know something about US politics. Yet, of course, I knew none of this on my first day of class, when I turned the corner and embarked on a hallway filled with cigarette smoke, dreadlocks, and “Abortion is a right” signs. Somosaguas was as liberal of a university as it could get, and knowing I would spend 10 hours a week for the next five months here, I inevitably decided to learn something about Spain’s political system, if not my own country’s.
At Somosaguas, many students openly express their political beliefs and are eagerly awaiting to hear the contrary, mainly because it will start a debate. This puts a lot of pressure on a girl that doesn’t really speak Spanish (me) and doesn’t know what the prevailing political systems are in Europe (me), or even how they differ from America, (clue: still me). This put me in a precarious situation, so when I grabbed a coffee with a Spanish friend from my Sociology of Exclusion and Crime class one day, I was in for a treat when he popped the question: “So, what do you think about Obamacare? Do you like socialized healthcare?” It wasn’t the first time I had been asked this question, yet I knew this kid wasn’t really interested in my response. He didn’t care about whether or not I was a Republican or a Democrat. He was more interested in how democratic I was, because to Spaniards, even the most liberal, left wing American citizen barely reaches the threshold to qualify as a Conservative in Europe, and since all the university students in Somosaguas are pretty liberal, he wanted to know with how conservative of a girl he was working with.
Throughout my classes and in my home stay family, I began learning about Francisco Franco’s dictatorship after the Spanish Civil War in 1936 until his death in 1975, which marked Spain’s era as a national, democratic political system. I continued to pick up and learn pieces of the Spanish political history, along with its biases from each person that tried explaining it to me, and my growing knowledge was again put to the test a couple weeks later at Somosaguas. Walking into my Anthropology of Religion class, I decided to read my Spanish literature book until my professor showed up. Class started at 1pm (meaning 1:10pm), but when I glanced at my watch, I realized it was now 1:28pm. Georgetown has an unspoken, fifteen-minute rule: if the Professor doesn’t show up in the first fifteen minutes of class, you leave. I was hoping someone would soon mention Spain’s XYZ minute-rule, but instead, my thoughts were interrupted by a classmate that barged in and proclaimed, “A Christian anti-abortion association is here to talk trash to us; Monica is downstairs watching!” Within seconds, half of my class rushed downstairs to watch the spectacle, while the other half discussed the news that had just been passed along.
Monica is my professor’s first name. Apparently, she was downstairs watching an anti-abortion association speak to Somosaguas students about the conservative, Christian belief on abortion (remember, political atmosphere of this school: liberal), explaining her absence from class. As one would presume, the conservative organization’s presence was not entirely welcome. What angered a classmate of mine the most, she later stated in the discussion we had following the incident, was the flyers they brought supporting their ideas. “It’s like an insult to us. You think you can come onto our campus and impose your ideas like that? We will not accept that, and you better bet your ass I will say something!” The rest of the class followed in rage, and even the Professor later stated her agreement with the students, mentioning that her personal versus professional reaction was the only thing keeping her from fighting the association (although other students didn’t hesitate responding in a similar manner).
I didn’t understand. In the US, some of my best friends were Republicans, and although I didn’t necessarily agree with them, I wholeheartedly believed they had the right to free speech, to say whatever they felt in an open discourse, without the fear of getting physically assaulted for their personal beliefs. Although this was not the case at Somosaguas, another international student in my class asked what I was thinking at the moment, mentioning that she didn’t think violence was the answer to the issue. One boy, clearly fed up with the international student’s vision of an idealistic peace between ideologically different political parties, stood up to contest. He told the girl, “They didn’t come here to talk about their ideas. They brought pamphlets, and they came to the Political Science department, for God’s sake. They had the intention of fighting us; we just followed through, and you can’t say we are wrong for reacting that way.” Sure you can, I thought, but didn’t dare say it in that politically perturbed environment. After class, he told everyone to sit down for a minute, as the class had to vote on something else—the huelga next week.
In Spanish, a huelga is a strike, and at UCM, it is voted on by a student union that decides whether or not they want to protest against a strongly held belief that is in opposition of the government, to the point where they will refuse to go to class for a set number of days to show their discontent. The night before, all students participate in a lock-in, where they prepare materials for the huelga. The morning of, they line up outside of each entrance to various department buildings and physically prevent or verbally abuse students, faculty, and staff that attempt to enter the buildings. A year-abroad international student added that last semester’s huelga lasted for two weeks, with students fighting for sanitation workers’ higher wages. In protest and rage, student burned trashcans and blocked all streets throughout the campus, threw paper and other trash in the hallways, and even resorted to peeing in public areas to demonstrate the hard labor of sanitation workers. This semester’s huelga was in protest of the government’s reduction in student scholarships for public universities, known as becas. When someone first told me about the issue, I had to laugh. These students were paying 2,000 Euros per year for tuition, and they thought that was a lot? Georgetown’s $60,000 a year would have launched them into cardiac arrest immediately, much less even an attempt at a huelga, and they were crying about 2,000 Euros? It made no sense to me, but I also wasn’t about to protest a potential five-day weekend. Wednesday and Thursday were official strike days, but Somosaguas was looking at Tuesday through Friday, which was to be voted on right now.
“Anyone against coming to class next week?” asked the boy in my class, waiting a full two seconds for any traitors. No one raised his hand, obviously. “Well then, it’s settled. Have a great week off guys.” The professor had jetted out the door by now and almost reached the other end of the hallway by the time I got outside. It seemed that many professors were reacting in a similar fashion after hearing about the strike, so when I asked a student in my Spanish literature class about it later that day, she explained, “The professors aren’t going to be in favor or against the strike because they get paid by the government. They have to show up to class either way. If they don’t come to class, they get a salary cut in their paycheck. So even if they’re on our side, they don’t ever state their opinion out loud.”
It stunned me, to be honest. The power that these students had, in coming together and speaking up against an issue that they believed so strongly in, that they would go as far as to compete with the natural order of the entire public university school system? In the US, we would call this chaos and immediately launch a police force to arrest the individuals or force them to protest quietly in a given, public area. Furthermore, the students probably wouldn’t have even skipped class in the first place, for fear of what they would miss. And for two days? Forget it. Here, though, it seemed so easy, so normal to rebel. “Why wouldn’t we?” was the mentality, and my two extra days off of school meant I was most definitely on the side of the students.
That Friday, I spoke to a friend from my religious community named Gabriel, who also attends Somosaguas, about the strike, and we inevitably launched into a discussion about the various political parties in Europe. Through our conversation, I learned that the American perspective of the Conservative Party aligns a bit to the left of what is moderate in Europe (if the scale ranged from left: liberal to right: conservative). This means that our conservative is actually liberal to Europeans? It was so weird, but I was soon too engulfed in Gabriel’s explanation of European politics to think about the irony of the situation. He continued by explaining that Europe’s left wing involves (moving from least liberal to most): Liberal, Socialist, then Communism. Wait….communism? I thought that was conservative! “No. Super conservative is like a dictatorship,” responded Gabriel, half amazed at how much I didn’t know about something as simple as politics. So basically, communism is super left, and dictatorship is super right. But aren’t they essentially the same thing?
After almost two hours of discussion, I learned that political parties in Europe form a circle, rather than the typical line spectrum we perceive between liberal and conservative. At the top of the circle lies the divide between left and right, where Communism is on the left and dictatorship on the right; in the middle towards the bottom, the Moderates. The left half of the circle is liberal, whereas the right half, conservative. Dictatorship and Communism lie close to one another on the circle at the top, yet represent two completely different ideologies; I had to go home and draw myself a map to have it all make sense.
And after all of that, I considered myself a politics expert, a guru if you will. Genuinely, friends, if a student in the School of Nursing and Health Studies can learn that much, the next natural course of action would be for me to run for President of the United States of America. And imagine what all I could do with everything I know about Obamacare, too…#presidentialcampaign2016?
19th and Nomad 