I mean, because we are in the pandemic – “all hurt” – and for most people between the ages of 20 and 40 the first generalized traumatic experience is being this, it will mark a line between the past and the later. These young people will especially notice the rupture: suddenly there comes a new time when implicit rules of play change, alliances and “social contracts” are blurred, seemingly solid complicities are broken and new ones are created, unobtrusive and difficult to interpret wills for those who come later.

Every generation has experienced such an episode. Many have already been thrown to shore, the illusions and ideals of youth through the sieve of reality. And for those who have survived, the feeling of a shipwreck that has left irreparable losses has been undeniable. It was a war for my parents, and the final years of Franco for my elders; there has also been a scratch from political violence and repression against it; after the heroin pandemic…

The end of the Cold War also came, what was it for the inhabitants of East Berlin, for the Chechens, for the habitual inhabitants of Yugoslavia…?, from the beginning of the twenty-first century: The attacks of New York, Madrid, Paris and London; the massacres of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and other countries… There were riots and protests, and among those around the age of forty, many claim one or the other, as if it were their “event”, which cannot be despaired from “May”. It may be, but I suspect that for most of them the real event is being a pandemic of little glory that is touching us these days.

During confinement, a stop occurs: “The economy has entered hibernation,” the headlines say. But the truth is that space is what is really stirred up, like in prison, in forced military service and in other similar ways. These enclosures mark the boundary between the first and the next for those who have been raped and are capable of creating complicity both as shared brands. They say time stops, but what really shrinks is space, and that's why time is what often opens us desperately. That's the key: the experience of expanded time that pulls us out of everyday life. This is a fundamental experience for monks, or that retreat monks to the intensive monks of meditation. In these cases, the external stimuli are violently reduced, there is no talk, the audiovisual connections are cut, a rigid discipline is followed in the endless hours that become tireless: in order for him to sit he takes care of the “nothing”, in the painful effort that strikes against a wall, where the mind and body shake before the evident injustice. Of course, we could adapt to this rhythm and become a new routine – the heavy routine of the prison or the convent, even more alienating than the street – quickly neutralising the potential distortions or transformations that these disciplines entail.

If we cannot live the confinement, “carrying the tiger that has touched us”, the experience can be very painful. We have already begun to talk about anxiety crises, the next depressive pandemic, the fall of the mask of forced coexistence…, of issues that will leave indelible wounds. Psychiatric consultations will collapse, psychologists will overflow, drug use will reach its peak... Although they say that the number of macho aggressions has decreased, the pressure increases over the hours and can explode at any time. And that's in rich countries. What clues will the body leave in the places where they leave on the streets? What clefts, policemen or armies, to avoid robberies, of hungry people when they start firing, where social war will be explicit, with statements of state of siege? – The sale of weapons has skyrocketed in EE.UU. ; Durarte made it clear: “Throw away people who don’t respect the lockdown!”

At best, a sense of unreality will surprise us. When the authorities calm the lockdown – always prospectively, since no one can ensure that the pandemic is not going to attack anything else – it seems to us that we are stepping on burnt ground. We will go out into the street as zombies, perhaps forced to wear gloves and face masks, and we will look as if we had unconfessable experiences – perhaps because we have not had any experience, but a hollow, bitter dizziness.

One of the most worrying news of these weeks, for me, is the results of the Eitb Focus survey, published in the first week of confinamiento.Como is usual, people were asked how they lived the situation and what concerns they had for the future. And that is the data that alarmed me: the fear of spreading the virus was the youngest; among them, 93% were very scared by the infection, more than any other age group, knowing that young people are not the most vulnerable. They were not so concerned about the future or the economic consequences, but about the possible aggression of the virus – it must not be said that these surveys are not aimed at invisible people, such as immigrants without papers or who live in a very precarious way. People who were in lockdown who had not been chosen for the first time in their lives in general were frightened by an “invisible enemy” – and it was only the first week of confinement. I was asked an inevitable question. “Would this society – not only youth – be prepared to give up certain rights of freedom if that were the price to be paid to deal with the viral threat – state control of life variables, movements, contacts, etc. – partly on the basis of the Chinese threat or South Korean models?” The answer leaves me no doubt, and that is why the authorities are already making the legal adjustments – despite data protection laws – for the sake of increasingly intense social control in the name of security. “Data is the new capital,” and to collect and control data giants – Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. – have long reached the top of quotes. The macabre paradox is that Bill Gates is claimed these days as a prophet who announced the pandemic five years ago. He said that governments did nothing to predict what's going on, and he created the largest private foundation to investigate the vaccine. Needless to say, the big pharmaceutical giants have speedily made donations to Gates’ “altruistic foundations”. It's not hard to guess the next chapters of this whole story.

The blow to this pandemic reality has made us dizzy. Despite the pious manifestations of intellectuals, ecclesiastics or politicians, nothing makes us think that in that blow we will emerge stronger and more united. We will be followed by this vertigo, and the darkest impulse of the most ruthless law of the forest. There will be exceptions, as it could not be otherwise. Small Community initiatives are being stepped up, strengthening themselves as the first vital need; the friendship that has been put to the test is being strengthened in some cases. The old trenches and fronts are dissolved and new connections are created. The move towards the maturity of many young people will become inevitable.