Before the last letter

I always start reading the newspaper because of the letters to the director.

Perhaps because they continue to be called that, letters, of which they are hardly written anymore.

And then because they are stories and they are short, which is what time requires: it is the minimum unit of reading before an alert or a message distracts us or someone publishes another song of reproaches:

, they call it now.

Before they called it boleros, but each generation builds its own dictionary and its own music.

Letters from readers are about all these things, who talk about the same thing about a song and its lyrics, who criticize a politician or take the opportunity to say goodbye to a dying mother.

You don't know what you are going to find on that half page, although you know that something will be found, and that is where the validity of the genre is understood.

The letters that are most read do not carry opinions, but stories, and that is why there are some that, so simple and so short, have everything that many two-page reports lack: the ability to move.

Not in a sappy and maudlin sense, but in its literal sense: they make you think about something.

to do something

They outrage or annoy you.

They put you in a good mood.

They make you talk loud.

Whatever.

That whatever it is is what explains the importance of our trade and the challenge for journalists: indifference.

The studies say —and confirm the consumption and sales data— that the news is of less interest, that the pandemic saturated us with information.

That people need a breather and that they are fed up with bad omens.

The studies say that for this reason there is always an episode of

or

on TV , as if it were the emergency service that those who ask for escape routes go to.

Journalism is in that balance, wondering how to tell what it should without drowning in catastrophizing.

And, at the same time, without ceasing to be what it has to be.

The answer may be in the stories, which are still moving.

A few days ago, this newspaper published the letter from Belén Hernández, who recounted the situation of a 23-year-old boy, with hardly any money and at risk of suicide.

They gave him a tranquilizer and an appointment for a year in the public health.

He did not need anything else a la carte.

He did not need the capital letters or the sensational details.

14 lines were enough to describe what was there.

Then she, the psychologist, was on the radio and in her phrases it was understood that her story would have moved so much: “It is repeated a lot to young people that they will be the first generation to live worse than their parents.

And what do we know?

It is the first generation of parents who do not know how to guide our children.

You don't know how many kids come here with the fantasy that, maybe, they're going to end up living on the street”.

It wasn't a story

then.

They were many.

That letter was not an escape route or a friendly story.

It was a crude description, short and simple.

And it was interesting, because that question has me talking to myself: do we know how to guide our children?

You have to look for more stories before the last letter arrives: that the apocalypse tires, but curiosity never ends.

And perhaps empathy either, even if they want to give it a bad press.

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