Worth a thousand words

The banner says “The Melchior Wańkowicz Journalism College, Warsaw”; those people up there on the balcony are presumably journalism students, possibly lecturers.

What they’re looking down on, in what appears to be mild bemusement, is a bunch of folks marching, waving flags and chanting in support of tenants’ rights.

The situation, especially in Warsaw, is dire. The general consensus in housing policy appears to be “throw it all to the wolvesprivate sector.” City-owned buildings are routinely being handed over to people with the flimsiest claims to pre-WWII ownership or inheritance. Virtually the only new apartment blocks being built are monstrous suburban fortresses for the “middle class.” Meanwhile, people entitled to housing assistance, which local and municipal governments are under obligation to provide, get put on a waiting list and told to come back in, oh, about seven years. And the rent is too damn high.

It’s business as usual: the legislative, judicial and executive apparatus of the State protects property owners while tenants get bled dry.

Look at these journalists: look how they’re dressed, check out their body language — comfortable, smirking, dominant. The crowd of at least a few dozen people, somewhere under a hundred, is invisible, and if they don’t bother writing about it, it will damn well stay that way. And if they do bother, it will become whatever they want it to be.

Or so they’d like to think, anyway. That picture? It’s an amazingly immediate, fascinatingly obvious manifestation of hegemony. But this one?

This is resistance.