Maybe I'll be back at T4 tonight!

The alarm bells have sounded regarding the situation at Terminal 4 of Barajas Airport . Five hundred homeless people are crammed onto the conveyor belts, in restrooms, and in public spaces, surrounded by bedbugs, garbage, and some violent scenes.

The problem isn't the infrastructure or the security of the airport terminal; what's truly serious and evident is the failure of the deficient social services.

In recent years, we've witnessed a gradual dismantling of these public services, especially in communities like Madrid, where it's understood that the electoral return obtained with genuine social policies is zero. But let's pause for a moment to analyze the reality of those 500 people, who perhaps weren't a nuisance elsewhere because we couldn't see them, and we'll understand why they were at the airport.

We will find different groups in the same situation and with different circumstances, but all of them share the common factor of the failure of institutions that intentionally or unintentionally neglect social services as a pillar of our well-being.

Among these people are mentally ill people who have been abandoned by the system, a brave and advanced model we decided to promote, but which has proved insufficient due to a lack of resources and the fact that it excludes patients whose circumstances prevent them from receiving the comprehensive treatment they need. Secondly, we find people who also have addictions and who refuse to access the network of public shelters (saturated and overflowing), which require compliance with rules incompatible with their addictions.

There's a third group made up of people who, after years of poverty and exclusion, end up trapped in a spiral from which they find it impossible to escape. And finally, there are the working poor—unbelievable, I know—workers who wash in those public restrooms every morning and end up cleaning our office, restocking the supermarket where we shop, or serving our breakfast coffee.

In a society where we affirm that work dignifies, we talk about the culture of effort, we even sometimes hear that there are people who do not want to work, we meet people who after a long day of work do not arrive home, to the sofa or their bed but to an airport terminal, a station or wherever they can because they must choose between eating or having a roof over their heads.

We continue to ask ourselves who is responsible because we do not want to recognize that social services are failing, that social housing policy in some communities and municipalities is nonexistent, that the constitutional responsibility for access to housing has been left on the shoulders of other workers (another day I will stop to talk about this) and for years we have refused to see the reality of the working poor in Spain, we are immersed in what my admired Mújica said, generating more needs for us to work more and live less.

At least for a moment, think that the waitress who makes your coffee or empties your trash may be coming back to Terminal 4 tonight.