Reading the Newspaper

La Voz de Galicia – January 31, 2025 →

Cristina PatoReading the newspaper every morning is a routine for me. No matter what I do or where I am, I always read the newspaper. I skim over some things, skip others entirely, and focus deeply on what interests me. But these past weeks, every time I open the paper, I feel like maybe it would be better not to read it at all. Yes, the world has been upside down for a long time, and bad news is everywhere, but there is something about this particular moment we are living through that makes me shudder constantly. The narratives in the two realities I inhabit—the U.S. and Europe—are becoming increasingly complex, or perhaps the opposite: they are becoming more binary. And precisely because of that, it’s hard to know what role one has in this society, where everyone seems to believe that anything outside their own version of the truth is unacceptable. And with that premise, meaningful dialogue becomes impossible.

Then I think of T.S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men” and his verses: “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper”, and I stare into nothingness, trying not to think about all the people I know on both sides of the world who are having a really hard time right now. I lower my head and feel the helplessness of not knowing what to do. I wonder where all this will lead us, and then I also feel fear—because looking at the last hundred years of history, it’s clear that while we have made progress in many ways, we remain the same “hollow men”. We forget that, in the blink of an eye, the world can turn upside down, and everything those before us fought for can disappear in an instant… That’s what I was thinking this week, every time I read the newspaper.

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