General strike

No idea how's the rest of the country but my street is 99% closed down. Only the Chinese shop is open. The poor guy had no idea of what was going on and I had to inform him (I had run out of coffee).

Long time no see - would surely be the best comment. When I was a kid (in the late 70s) we enjoyed journeys like today much more often, being the best excuse to skip school (along the fake bomb notice) . Going to the dentist wasn't actually that cool, specially because I went to my dad's dentist who did not use anaesthesy (it was my dad's choice because he gets sick with needles and blood).

I recall once I was heading back to school from the dentist and found my classmates at the square listening to the speech of certain older school mates. I was too young and uninformed but it seems they wanted to prevent the school from striking after senator Casas had been killed by the Autonomous Anticapitalist Commandos. In those days ETA and the Nationalist Left were against attacks against politicians, even if this senator was accused of being the head of repression in the Basque Country, so it was a quasi-consensual general strike. Only the autonomists opposed it and the students in my school had tried to prevent the school's closure.

In another occasion, when I was older and more conscious (and class subdelegate), I organized a clandestine strike on my own. The case was that the school had decided to forbid all political strikes, so when we agreed to second one in response to the murder by Spanish paramilitars of a Basque journalist (Xabier Galdeano) , they decided it was illegal and closed the delegates meeting room. The next morning I was writing and sticking posters calling for a strike for the right to strike. Incredibly enough, about two thirds of the school walked out that day.

It was one my "hero days", the other I can recall was when we painted in pink all the facade of the military government.

Well, general strike today in the Basque Country in reply to increasing political arrests. It doesn't just happen in Burma, you know.