La Voz de Galicia – October 6, 2023 →
This week, I read in a magazine an article by the university professor and marketing expert José Luis Nueno where he reflected on the fact that «the young have not lived a moment without crisis in their whole lives» where he mentioned the phrase permacrisis. And then I remembered that in 2022, the English Collins Dictionary had chosen it as the word of the year. «Permacrisis,» defined as a «prolonged period of insecurity and instability.»
I thought about the permacrisis, or permanent crisis, in which those in my parents’ generation had to live, those who were born with nothing in Galicia in the 1930s. I also thought about those who left to emigrate and stayed there, without knowing that they would end up living through another permanent crisis, like the one in Argentina or Venezuela. I thought as well in the citizens of Libya, or Senegal, or Syria, or Afghanistan, who even knowing they can die on the way (or disappear forever), decide to escape from their particular dramatic crises to be able to survive, and if they are lucky, end up in the permacrisis where those seeking refuge in Europe find themselves.
The complete definition is «a prolonged period of insecurity and instability as a result of a series of catastrophic events.» And one can’t stop thinking that the history of humanity is also a history of permacrisis. And that each country, with its circumstances, does what it can to be able to escape it.
