For the eighteenth consecutive year, New York Magazine has started December with an issue dedicated to “Reasons to love New York”. The cover photo is of a street intersection where more than 70 personalities gather, from cooks to models or journalists, artists and rappers. And on the inside pages there are up to 39 reasons to love this wonderful city.
There is no grandstanding. The magazine is pleased that, after the lockdowns, the city returns to being more unabashedly itself than it has been in decades. And it focuses on everyday issues such as the opening of new restaurants and second-hand clothing stores, the reappearance of scammers, that the subway is again full of people doing all kinds of things, that the mayor has announced that the Garbage can now spend fewer hours on the street to avoid problems with rats or that there is always room – even if it is on a mattress on the floor of a dining room – to accommodate one more New Yorker.
Thinking about who could edit something like this in our country, no one has occurred to me (who is not in the run-up to the electoral campaign). Sometimes it seems that no Barcelonan loves Barcelona. We constantly beat ourselves up and it is not that we lack reasons, surely there are, but we are rarely aware that if we ourselves do not know how to appreciate the good that we have, it will be difficult for us to improve it and move it forward.
We are in the habit of recreating ourselves in the bad things we have and in the mistakes of our administrations, without realizing that even these things also define us. As do the hundreds of corners with character that our city still preserves and the people who come together wanting to do things or have fun.
Around the same time that this edition of New York Magazine came out, The Economist published the commented article, “Unreasonable blue”, in which, citing a study, it concluded that we Spaniards are too grumpy with our politics, because, according to the magazine, here "things are going quite well". You don't have to be naive or dazzled by anything, but sometimes the future is also a matter of attitude.
