La Voz de Galicia – September 18, 2020 →
The hills are left burnt. And we are left burnt out. It seems that the patterns of destruction continue repeating themselves–the fires, the pandemic, the crisis…We know they are there, we see them coming, and even then we cannot handle them, or we don’t know what to do to avoid them. Impotence is one of those feelings that has as much the capacity to unite us in the face of great adversity as to completely separate us from reality so that we won’t even want to feel anything and settle into indolence.
But we will have to do something to go on, right? For me, one of those impressions with which I can’t find peace in these months is the idea that I don’t know what to fight against. Because without a doubt the virus is guilty of many things that are assailing us, but the truth is also that we knew in some way that many of the pillars that supported our society hung on from a feeble thread that would break with the smallest movement.
In one’s professional life, although it is sometimes blow by blow, one ends up learning to choose the battles that one wants to fight and leave aside those that are not worth it. But in the personal realm, and with all possible crises all around, one does not stop asking oneself which is the battle one wants to fight, which is the cause to which one wishes to contribute, and which is the injustice against which one wants to fight…
And meanwhile, the hills burn, businesses close, poverty and social exclusion grows and the elderly continue to be isolated. And where do we begin? Perhaps by not forgetting that these problems are not new, or by accepting that society’s collective forgetfulness that prompts these patterns of destruction to repeat themselves, where, unfortunately, we are all a little to blame.
