We are warned

We will have to spend this weekend under supervised release, warned as we are that as soon as it starts raining cats and dogs we had better lock ourselves at home, because with these climate change downpours there is no negotiating anything.

At the peak moment of a festive occasion like the Planeta award, Isabel Allende goes up to receive the prize and says: “Now that I see so many democracies threatened by fascism, I feel again the fear that led me to flee my country”, and she recalls the 1973 coup d'état in Chile, against the president who was her father's first cousin.

Speaking of democracies threatened by fascism, Donald Trump, who never misses an opportunity to sink lower, has perpetrated the scoundrel act of buying oil from Putin because elections are coming up and he needs the price of gasoline and the cost of living to go down, while leaving Ukraine to its fate before Russia.

The scurryings of these days to the left of the PSOE (scurryings with the runners running in opposite directions, as was to be expected) supposedly were to avoid that saying “if we go separately, we will be hanged separately”. It was a metaphor. Or maybe not, because the recordings of Spanish army soldiers boasting about the best way to beat people in Ceuta are no metaphor.

Living in a state of permanent alert has become a condition of life. Provisionality accompanies every plan and the future cannot be predicted, unless we surrender to the darkest omens. We must practice freedom of thought and action to escape this supervised freedom. It cannot be that every hope has its own corresponding threat.