Nothing comparable with the plague that we suffer, and I do not pretend to compare it.
However, it has brought two others, very minor, but which have dominated speeches, newspaper articles, television and radio programs and statements from interviewees, until they produce an unhealthy saturation.
As always, I speak for myself, I shouldn't clarify it;
But this is such an elementary time that it is better to clarify everything.
(They tell me that some multinational companies of the book have issued some "editorial principles" that basically consist of advising against giving any text that could offend someone to the press. The most appropriate thing would be to close the business and that nothing is published, because in a A world as hypersensitive as the current one, there will always be groups or individuals who want to be offended by trifles. If what is written and published is going to be subject to the infinite subjectivities of very thin skin, I say, we better close them all.)
The first side plague (sorry, but "collateral" is a bad translation from English, no matter how much the Academy has accepted it, as it now accepts so many inaccuracies and nonsense) has been corny, to which too many people have given free rein in Spain, a strange case of a beast country given to little credible molasses and syrup.
For months we have been hearing and reading lamentations for the "lost hugs", for the "covered smiles", for the "hands that can no longer be held", for "the grandparents we cannot see" and so on.
Probably many of those lamentable ones did not hug anyone or visit their grandparents, they hardly smiled and slapped their husbands or wives when they stroked their hands.
But you have to see how good it is today to be sensitive and maudlin, and call every Christ a “hero”: the toilets, the elderly, the cashiers, the street sweepers… They have enormous merit, but they don't need a hyperbolic coba.
Since March we have endured emphatic appeals to "empathy," which is undoubtedly lacking - bad shadows - by many admongers.
There are columnists so blunt that they reproach some of us for criticizing such a noble concept, without realizing that we are not objecting to the concept -it would be more necessary-, but the ridiculous word chosen to manipulate it, and the stupidest verb "to empathize", both copies of English again.
Until a few decades ago, no one felt "empathy" in our language, but "sympathy", "compassion", "pity", "pity", "solidarity", "identification" and even mere "pity" for the other.
Being a writer and having literature as one of the best and most comforting arts, I have ended up (almost) detesting it because of the empathy with which it is spoken of in this unfortunate period.
It is made cheaper and rubbed excessively, with so much sweetened loa.
There are authors who do not know how they do not blush with shame when they ask that the new year bring us "beauty, a lot of beauty" (like that, in bulk) and "poetry, a lot of poetry."
Good heavens, the only thing most want is a vaccine, an effective drug, that the epidemic ends and we can all return to our prosaic chores, which are almost all of those that occupy us on a daily basis, starting with earning a living.
There have been authors who in their most political pieces do not shy away from the scoundrel, and who have dared to give us a tenderness about how much they loved a kitten and how much they took care of it ...
The other side plague has been that of the ashes, embodied, above all, in sociologists, political scientists, pseudoscientists (they have sprouted like mushrooms) and the self-styled philosophers. Throughout history the philosophers were few: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Hume, Dilthey, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, not many more. Today any teacher or amateur is considered a "philosopher". Well, a large part of these garrulous have dedicated themselves to embittering us in two main aspects: some are the new sorcerers, who, as in remote centuries, have blamed humanity for the pandemic: for their bad habits, their lack of respect for the seas, fields or animals, his consumerist or hedonistic or promiscuous life. Like the usual priests. The others have rejoiced in giving us no truce, and in the midst of a planetary calamity, they have rushed to announce more, future and worse. They speak with ease of "the next plague", as if it were a certain thing (they forget that we had not suffered one in a century), and announce it imminent. They predict innumerable catastrophes: floods, fires, earthquakes and tidal waves (they forget that there have always been them), irreparable calcination and desertification. Perhaps they are right and all that awaits us. But there is a visceral sadism in taking it for granted while trying to get out of a good fat. They love dystopias, like so many crude novelists and screenwriters, and they never have in mind the historical capacity of humanity to remedy threats through intelligence, engineering, research and science; often to conjure them. Yes, of course, everything can be cataclysmic, but do we need to take it for granted and give us a hunch in advance? I hope the coronavirus does not last much longer. If he leaves, they won't go away — never, never — but maybe the corny stomachs and angry ashes will subside and calm down a bit.
