March 8th is coming again, and many women will once more take to the streets to denounce all that remains to be done to achieve equality, and, above all, to highlight the unbearable violence of all kinds that, once again, seems to be escalating against us. How distant that March 8th of 2018 seems, when girls, mothers, and grandmothers flooded the streets, and for a moment, we thought that the path toward true equality was finally unstoppable!

Since Trump began his second term, the world seems to be living in a state of both shock and fascination. We never imagined that, in such a short time, someone could destroy an international order created with such effort, could annihilate respect for the institutions that seemed most solid to us, could demonstrate so clearly that his whim is law. Every day a shock, a surprise, a new attack on coexistence manages to keep us on edge, hanging on Trump's every word.

As much as we might want to ignore it, the year begins darkly, politically speaking. Trump is turning the global order upside down, and we are facing a rapid growth of far-right options, which are very threatening and, at this moment, seem to have unstoppable force. For those of us who are older and have lived under dictatorship, this trend is almost incomprehensible, and it is inevitable that we ask ourselves how we got here.

According to tradition, a poor couple arrived in Bethlehem one very cold night. They had nowhere to shelter and were about to have a child. Jesus was born in a cave, and seeing such vulnerability, everyone around them was moved: angels, shepherds, and even kings. 2,000 years later, we still reflect on this story.

This month, we'll be talking again about violence against women and children, what's called "vicarious violence." We're seeing how male chauvinist violence is increasing, and we talk about it a lot, but nothing is being done about it. Now, in many cases, it's underage boys who feel entitled to perpetrate it and even attack it online, which shows us how the most aggressive form of sexism is becoming fashionable.

We are living in a time in which the presence of immigrants has become a political weapon, and when this happens, reasonable thinking and action cease, and the landscape becomes filled with ghosts. But, beyond partisan interests, it is necessary to try to organize this process to avoid all kinds of conflicts, which will increasingly arise if appropriate policies are not implemented.

The Diada calls us once again to think about ourselves as a people, to decide what we want to be in the coming years. It's beginning to be time to ask ourselves again where we want to go, and to do so calmly, without exclusions or arguments, but rather through reasoning, one of our precious words that calls us to a well-crafted and shared reason. Our national holiday commemorates a setback, but Catalonia has always grown in the face of defeat: we think, if not of the great growth in the 18th century, then just after 1714, as Pierre Vilar taught us.

Many people are wondering these days how it's possible for a political leader who lives closely with members of his team to be unaware of the systematic corruption that occurs in some cases. And apparently they're right; it seems impossible to have been at the side of a consummate cheat for years and not have detected any hint of his fraudulent activity. Are these leaders so short-sighted, so insensitive that they don't notice what some outward manifestations must inevitably have?

On October 13, 1909, Francesc Ferrer i Guardia was shot at Montjuïc Castle. A military court had sentenced him to death, accusing him, without any evidence, of having instigated the riots of Tragic Week, the Barcelona uprising sparked by the decision of Maura, then Prime Minister, to call up reservists to fight the Rif in the Rif region. Most of the reservists were elderly, fathers of humble origins, and they refused to accept this decision. The fighting was fierce: nearly 100 people died—most of them civilians—around 2,000 were imprisoned, and five were shot. One of them was Ferrer i Guardia, to make an example of punishment.

Masculinity is not a given derived from nature, but rather from the social models constructed at each stage, which attribute different characteristics to men and women based on the social needs of each era, and also, of course, on who has more power. As societies change, models of masculinity and femininity need to change because they become outdated, and their maintenance ends up harming everyone, but especially people of the gender that clings most to the past.

A common observation in sociological analysis is that societies change more rapidly than prevailing ideas. We are formed in childhood and youth, which is when we acquire notions of how things are, what values ​​to defend, and what the appropriate options are at any given moment. With the acceleration of social change, it becomes very difficult for our beliefs and values ​​to transform at the same pace as the circumstances in which we live; and this fact, so evident at this moment, has many consequences, both in the difficulty of reaching agreements between generations and in the near impossibility of accepting new options, even if our lives are at stake. What we have always believed cannot suddenly be abandoned and denied, because deep down we believe that things are as they are and that, after certain scares, everything will return to how it was.

A common observation in sociological analysis is that societies change more rapidly than prevailing ideas. We are formed in childhood and youth, which is when we acquire notions of how things are, what values ​​to defend, and what the appropriate options are at any given moment. With the acceleration of social change, it becomes very difficult for our beliefs and values ​​to transform at the same pace as the circumstances in which we live; and this fact, so evident at this moment, has many consequences, both in the difficulty of reaching agreements between generations and in the near impossibility of accepting new options, even if our lives are at stake. What we have always believed cannot suddenly be abandoned and denied, because deep down we believe that things are as they are and that, after certain scares, everything will return to how it was.

Trump points to new human groups that must be annihilated every day, and he is no longer content, as in his first term, with bluffing and naming the biblical plagues that will fall upon them, but is now ready to unleash hell upon us. We have known many bluffs throughout history, it is not an innovation, but we simply did not expect that this could happen now. Suddenly, we see that this is not the case, that everything can go backwards or collapse, that, in a word, everything can get worse, as has happened other times in history.

Trump points to new human groups that must be annihilated every day, and he is no longer content, as in his first term, with bluffing and naming the biblical plagues that will fall upon them, but is now ready to unleash hell upon us. We have known many bluffs throughout history, it is not an innovation, but we simply did not expect that this could happen now. Suddenly, we see that this is not the case, that everything can go backwards or collapse, that, in a word, everything can get worse, as has happened other times in history.

The decision to expand Barcelona airport is a perfect example of the values defended by a mentality anchored in the past. Of a neoliberal model that corresponds to the collective needs of a certain moment in history, but is incapable of evolving to adapt to the needs demanded by the present. As always happens, the socially and economically dominant sectors do not want anything to change, because the established situation is favourable to them. At the most, they stick to the principle of "let everything change so that nothing changes", that is to say, to a verbal camouflage that adopts new expressions, in order to appear modern, but that hides old intentions. It is obviously a matter of keeping the party going, so that no one tries to spoil our business.