Fear death by water

Human nature is reactive: it shrinks before the announcement of danger, and puffs out its chest, blusters, and becomes careless when the danger has passed without causing great havoc. This weekend it was curious to see, on social media, that those who showed the most apprehension in the face of the warnings about the climatic anomaly arriving in Catalonia – mini-hurricane, medicane, or Mediterranean hurricane: all the names are rather ugly – later mocked the alarm once the worst had passed, or so it seemed.

Cowardice and arrogance are the two sides of the same attitude. The world (society, the country, the West: call it what you will) is facing two emergencies, the climate and the democratic one. The environment and democracy are in danger. Or if you prefer: the survival of the human species within nature, and the most rational and least unjust way we have found to organize this survival, are in danger because many have begun to stop believing in them. In survival and in organization. Instead of that, they have decided to entrust everything to money, a convention invented for the purpose of exchanging products, merchandise, consumer goods. With money, however, they build homelands and patriotic discourses to make the poor guilty of the evils that afflict the homeland. A far from virtuous circle.

Climate change deniers are democracy deniers, and naturally, it is no coincidence. They are the cowards when black storm clouds appear in the sky who later come out to act like big shots once the storms have already fallen and "only" one or two elderly people have died (who, naturally, are not from their illustrious lineage). They are, also, those who say that a hegemony of PP and Vox in Spain, or one of Aliança Catalana in Catalonia, will not be worse than the whipped and belittled social democracy. They are not the rank and file of the far right, but the "intellectuals" who rush to whitewash it, some out of cynicism, others out of calculation, others out of resentment, and still others out of pure and simple ineptitude. One plays dumb, another draws absurd comparisons, the one further away makes a direct defense of racist politicians, more or less clumsy, but a defense nonetheless. They are creating a charged and grumpy atmosphere, a thick soup with a stale aftertaste.

As always when the dark clouds gather, there are those who think they will still profit from the storm. Others are already so corrupted and rotten that they wish for everyone else to be ruined too. On a social network, I am pleased to read Marina Rossell quoting Hannah Arendt: “The death of human empathy is one of the first and most revealing signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism”. This applies to those who treat immigrants as invaders or colonists, to those who laugh at the evicted or force a sour expression in front of the poor who disrupt their patriotic project. Above all, the climate emergency hangs. We read it in The Waste Land, Eliot's poem: “[...] Fear death by water. / I see crowds of people walking in circles”.