May it not be too late

These days I take the opportunity to hang some pictures and I am thankful that my flat is not a town hall because I would not find any suitable corner to hang the portrait of King Felipe VI. Nothing is Bourbon to me, at home. I have placed, and prominently, the couple of the Queen of England and Angela Merkel in a magnificent image smiling at Windsor Castle, on the farewell tour that the chancellor is beginning to make. It is a question of taste and contradictions. As we can still choose our private decoration for the time being, I make the most of the freedom, like when I'm scrubbing a jar of Nutella. Let's be free up to the bottom of the jar, because it's getting rough.

The Provincial Court of Madrid has considered that hate speech against young immigrants is not hate, it is political campaigning, and expresses, on top of that, that they really are a problem, when the problem is not young people but the system, but they are not so stupid as to throw stones on their own roof. Someone has to defend what never works so that it never really works. The aim seems to be to support from the judicial sphere the normalisation of the extremely dangerous proclamations of a group that wants to systematise violence, as if it were not sufficiently structural and needed to be reinforced. Not that this is anything new on the part of the Spanish judiciary but, with the weariness we are accumulating, I say that it was enough to know that the Francisco Franco Foundation works for historical memory and has every right in the world to express its fascist apologia freely. Spain is a fair-minded country as long as you don't express your thoughts in Catalan or as long as you don't feel like singing a song in homage to the Bourbon monarchy. Worst of all, however, is that there is a part of the public that now realises this Hungarian drift of their country because when repression fell (falls) only on Catalonia it was because of a provocation, not an act of freedom of expression. It is the "if they broke the law, they have to pay". When the extreme right is the law, there is no dignity left but to break the law incessantly. And, in the heat, making any physical effort is understandable laziness. But there is no excuse.

For some time now there has also been a warning about the homophobia that circulates very freely in the streets and there has also been a response to the aggressions, murders and hatred in general with a little more violence on the part of the State, as when feminist protests were repressed with inconceivable trials. The idea is the same. There is no need to be original. The goal is that a system of general repression can be established to expel everything that is considered not to fit into the normative canons of heterosexual white people, and if they can be apostolic Catholics even better. Involution is in vogue. That's why the protests against these continued hate crimes, against this need for barbarians to cleanse towns and cities of people who hold up their ignorance to a mirror, has not been met with much sensitivity by a police force that often uses improper words. This is when it speaks and does not quietly use the truncheon in the least villagepeopleian way possible. 

All of this, frankly, is frightening. And all of it affects everyone. It is not about a collective. It's about rights and freedoms that have long been disregarded in favour of thoughts that we already know what they lead to - and what they will turn us into as a society.