The 1976 Constitution has two hundred and ninety-six articles. I know this because I looked it up, which already puts me in a considerable statistical minority. Today, it reads like a love letter written by someone who no longer expected a reply. <\/p>\n\n
Article 65 is, of all, the cruelest. It states, with the solemnity of someone dictating a will, that everyone has the right to housing of \u2018adequate size<\/em>\u2019, in \u2018conditions of hygiene and comfort<\/em>\u2019, which preserves \u2018personal intimacy<\/em>\u2019 and \u2018family privacy\u2019<\/em>. It is a beautiful paragraph. It has the rhythm of a wedding vow and the solidity of a mirage. <\/p>\n\n Fifty years later, \u2018adequate size<\/em>\u2019 has been translated by the grammar of the market into the vernacular of misery: it is a studio flat renting for \u20ac800, a hole without light where personal privacy boils down to hearing your neighbour coughing through plasterboard walls.<\/p>\n\n Comfort is a polar fleece blanket bought on sale. Privacy is what you find an hour away by bus from where you work, in exchange for the privilege of having a roof over your head that, technically, belongs to the bank or to an investment fund. <\/p>\n\n The problem isn\u2019t the Constitution. The problem has never been the Constitution. The problem is us: we found it much easier to celebrate a document than to fulfill it. <\/p>\n\n Tomorrow, I\u2019ll be celebrating too. I have the utmost respect for the people who wrote that document. That generation still believed the right words could change the world. <\/p>\n\n Sometimes, even I believe it. But then I remember the letter was addressed to us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The problem isn\u2019t the Constitution. The problem has never been the Constitution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chronicles"],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":false,"thumbnail":false,"medium":false,"medium_large":false,"large":false,"1536x1536":false,"2048x2048":false},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"Ilidio Louro","author_link":"https:\/\/formol.cc\/en\/author\/admin-ilouro\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"The problem isn\u2019t the Constitution. The problem has never been the Constitution.","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/formol.cc\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/formol.cc\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/formol.cc\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/formol.cc\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/formol.cc\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1085"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/formol.cc\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1085\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1102,"href":"https:\/\/formol.cc\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1085\/revisions\/1102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/formol.cc\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/formol.cc\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/formol.cc\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}