Throughout history, man has communicated with his fellow beings. However, communication is what has suffered the greatest transformations throughout the history of the human race.
Starting with the mysterious and ephemeral communication of our ancestors from Atapuerca, for instance, later with the Greek agora, the nineteenth century gatherings in cafés, and ending with the lonely communication of the Internet, man has modified his communication.
It would seem that in the life of the individuals, as in the life of peoples, the fact of communicating with each other should be related to contact or proximity. It is obvious that it is not this way; if it were, we would think that proximity would imply the possibility of an easy and comprehensible communication with each other.
Our present time tells us that it does not square, since the constant proximity we share does not represent the rate equal to the degree of communication that proximity would make us conceive.
Time goes by without communicating with our neighbours, life goes by ignoring our fellow beings, those we meet daily in the street, in the doorway or those who are beside us in the pub.
This lack of communication grows and gets worse when referred to immigrants, with or without documents.
Before this social phenomenon, of great importance for our societies, our communicative culture stands on end, closes hermetically and blocks all the ways of communication, dialogue and understanding because of that strange interference.
This is the paradox of communication, so rich in means and so poor in results.
I do not try to create a moral or psychological question at all. I am saying that I think all this is strictly and sadly real. I see communication as the baptism that identifies man as a social being.
The whole human race must commit itself to a necessary and permanent venture of communication, of dialogue. Communication integrates not only the group of socio-economic and socio-political structures, but it supports the essence which makes a man what he is.
The Associations of Retired Staff and Pensioners from Savings Banks, considered as small companies are an example of communication.
Within the structure of these associations, written communication, notes, circular letters, bulletins, and so on, work as an informative vehicle of the common objectives, associative matters, are the process of the social information. In the journals published by the different associations, their members express their ideas, their opinions, their feelings, in a communication enriching spirit.
By means of visits of museums, centres or places of tourist, cultural or recreational interest, we seek brotherhood, communication between you and me, make the associative communication alive, in proximity, with the human contact.
Communication, essential for the human being, must be as food for the social body, a way that will channel the collective life among the Associations of Retired Staff and Pensioners from Savings Banks which are part of the European Group. May it be so and may all of us cooperate to achieve it.
(Association of Retired Staff and Pensioners from
CAJA MADRID)
