When the hero is no longer news
During the pandemic, the message was repeated everywhere: health workers were “the heroes.” Governments said it, the media said it, television ads said it. They were, we were told, the best of us, the ones who risked their lives walking into overwhelmed hospitals while the world locked itself away in fear. The word “hero” was used so often that it felt like a tribute. Today, those same heroes are marching through the streets with banners, and one of them sums it all up with a painful bluntness: “during Covid we were heroes, and now we look like criminals.”
What they are asking for is neither luxury nor privilege. They are asking for a salary they can live on, medicines for their patients, supplies as basic as wound-care materials, equipment and even uniforms. At heart, they are asking to be able to do their work with dignity: to save lives without lacking the essentials to do so. In some hospitals they work “under protest,” still caring for patients, but knowing that at any moment even a painkiller may run out. The paradox is brutal: those who look after everyone's health are the ones now working without the health of a system to support them.
And here something emerges that says a great deal about us as a society. While staff were reporting that even the simplest things were missing, the same institution was spending millions on advertising to promote its own image. Money for ads, but not for medicines. It is the symptom of a deeper illness: the habit of caring for how things look more than for the things themselves. Of applauding in the emotional moment and forgetting once the cameras are gone.
Because that is the most unsettling part: how easy it is to give someone a title and how hard it is to live up to it. Calling someone a “hero” costs nothing; what does cost is paying them a fair wage, giving them the supplies to work and listening to them when they speak up. The word served its purpose in the moment of fear, when we needed them desperately. But words are carried off by the wind as soon as the urgency passes, and what remains is reality: the same people as always, working more and receiving less.
Behind every protest there is a concrete story. There is the nurse who faces the complaints of patients tired of medicines running out, even though the shortage is not her fault. There is the doctor stretching supplies however he can so they last. There is the family leaving the hospital pharmacy with a prescription they will have to pay for out of their own pocket. They are two sides of the same problem: a system that fails those who hold it up and, therefore, also fails those who depend on it.
Perhaps the true measure of a civilization lies not in what it calls those who care for it, but in how it treats them when no one is talking about them anymore. Remembering what we lived through during the pandemic is, for Semiversal, the only way not to repeat the forgetting suffered today by those who held us up in our darkest moment. And the question these banners leave behind is as uncomfortable as it is necessary: if we truly value those who care for us, why do we only remember them when we need them? Because gratitude, as those applauses that faded from the balconies showed, is not measured by the noise of a moment, but by what we are willing to sustain once the fear has passed.