Battle Radio

Last Monday, the day dawned just like so many others, but quickly turned out to be common. In an instant, the lights went out, the black-painted screens, the mobile phones no longer have a net. Portugal and Spain dived almost simultaneously in a blackout that lasted hours and that took us what, nowadays, we think is essential: electricity and, perhaps even more disturbing, the mobile communications network, data and immediacy.

It was a strange silence. Not the silence of words, but the silence of signs, notifications. We stop being able to send messages, see the news, listening to the digital brash that usually fills our days. It was not just the absence of light – it was the absence of information, connecting to the outside world. And with this absence came the restlessness: what is going on? Would it have been a cybership? A chain accident? Something even bigger?

It was then that, at home, we remembered to turn on my grandmother’s radio. Normally, the radio is linked to the chain but before the blackout we had to resort to traditional batteries. The old radio stacks with metal antenna and rotating buttons would become the great protagonist of the day.
There he was, the radio, doing what he always did: inform, follow, comfort. It was through him that we realized that the blackout was widespread, that the authorities were working to replace the network, that hospitals were working with generators, that we were not alone. The radio became, at that time, the only bridge between our disconcerting and some form of understanding. Who would say that in such a digital and frantic era, radio would be our great ally, the hero of this long chaotic day.

Interestingly, while the radio connected us to the country, the blackout brought people to the street, to live, walk or do sport. There were many neighbors to the conversation, with time, intrigued by everything that was going on. It was as if, for a moment, the blackout had underlined something essential: real life, made of physical presences and eyes in the eye.
This blackout was a hard but necessary reminder of the fragility of our technological dependence. When it all fails, the essentials naturally states. And that day, the essentials was an FM frequency that crossed the walls of time to remind us that sometimes what is old is not exceeded – is simply reliable.

Here is my testimony. And my tribute to the radio. Let us never stop listening, even to remember that the most important connection is sometimes the one that does not need Wi-Fi.