Michel Foucault proposes a very apt dichotomy to define our ambivalent relationship with what we have called "the welfare state." While the pre-modern state "kills and lets live," the contemporary state "makes live and lets die." I also recall another one that always makes me think: "Health has replaced salvation." These are memorable summaries that show us that the Leviathan is no longer an impersonal and distant force that merely punishes those who break the law, but has become a solicitous agent whose main function is to watch over the population, and which incorporates a function that was formerly the monopoly of the Church: caring for souls. All this may seem quite abstract, but it becomes concrete if we think about the conflicting feelings that almost everyone has experienced as a result of the country's lockdown due to the storm and the proliferation of mobile phone alerts. What should we do about the irritation we feel toward the state's excessive care?

"It's hard to see and say where the desire for liberation, to be free from oppression, ends, and where the desire for freedom, to live a political life, begins," says one of the many phrases I've underlined from The freedom to be free, of Hannah Arendt (Linden, 1906 – New York, 1975). This is a compilation of three articles published by Eumo Editorial, translated by Laia Font i Mateu and with a prologue by Fina Birulés, slightly ahead of the 120th anniversary of the political philosopher's birth, which will be celebrated next year.

It's hard to accept frustration at the ongoing spectacle of death and terror in Gaza. Thousands of people die every day, victims of the uncontrolled violence of Benjamin Netanyahu's Israeli regime. The cries of despair, the bombings, the snipers targeting food lines, the bodies destroyed by explosions or turned into specters, into ghosts, by hunger. Images of genocide continue to unfold while the international community watches helplessly, unable to stop the horror.

The American Dream is coming to an end. It's as if we feel Trump telling us: "Europeans, go home". All the cinematic appeal, all the epic of the conquest of the West, of the cities of skyscrapers and houses with swimming pools, rock'n'roll and Fordism, of immigrants who carve out a future for themselves, the self-made man and the Statue of Liberty, the melting can... What remains of all this? The land of opportunity is rapidly becoming the other side of the coin: racism, hatred of difference, deportations, closed borders, expulsion and barriers to entry of talent, isolationism, fear, crisis, polarization. From dream to nightmare. Trump is making dystopia a reality, destroying what remained of the mirage.