Choose what you shut up about

It is more difficult to be silent than to speak, as time has set.

The age demands that an opinion be formed in a hurry and expressed, so that all impressions count the same and, thus, confusion can be taken for pluralism.

It is a good time for beliefs, then.

It could not be distinguished if society lacks references or if they have been diluted because, for an argument to spread, what you know about it is not appreciated so much, but the followers you have or the audience you give.

What will be valued, in the end, will be your desire to say things, provocative if possible, with the benefit that nobody will remember what you are going to say —starting with you, of course— and, of course, nobody will care.

The fact that speaking was in fashion does not mean that listening was also in fashion, that everything cannot be done.

Talking speaks anyone, but the really difficult thing is to keep quiet.

And choose what you shut up about: as we get older, what will visit our consciences will be silences rather than phrases that we did wrong or that we did at the wrong time.

Worse than having said something inconvenient is not having said what we thought.

This will haunt us to the end because, if it is the time of noise, a silence causes a roar: more complicated than having something to say is deciding what to keep quiet about at a time when, overwhelmed with information and images, one cannot claim ignorance for no reason.

The big brother is also us.

Pope Francis pointed it out on Christmas Day, when he spoke of the war in Ukraine and the other wars, which we forget because gas and prices are not more expensive.

The Pope is right, who fights against the most retrograde of the church to remain a moral reference for millions of Catholics.

He is right to call for "concrete gestures of solidarity" and to denounce that the world is "sick with indifference" when, now that nothing is ignored, this implies our true ethical dilemma: deciding what we are indifferent to.

The morning after the Pope had delivered his speech, EL PAÍS had a four-column headline in its first page: "The Church imposes silence on hundreds of abuses."

First there were 251 cases that the newspaper compiled;

then, 500. The information, signed by Julio Núñez and Íñigo Domínguez, described the lack of response from the Episcopal Conference a year after it received the first report, despite the fact that journalists knocked door to door on the 141 affected orders and dioceses .

One of the victims wondered: "Fuck you life is free?".

Another said: “This is still like Vetusta in

I understand that my parents did not report.

If it's like that now, in the 1970s I don't even want to think about it”.

The Pope is right: indifference is an evil, related to farsightedness: one sees from afar rather than from near.

In the time of noise, a silence causes noise.

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