As fleeting as anything that lacks deep roots, the idea of change only survives until the first shock of reality.
There is no doubt that the unbroken line of time – plus one more week, minus one less week – unfailingly leads us to pay for mistakes, to chase fatuous dreams and to persist in wrong actions. And so, we begin an agenda of blank pages whose printed lines will be filled with new appointments too similar to those of the previous agenda and one or another project that is predictably similar to the one that has not been carried out during the past 12 months.
Outside, in the street, leaving aside the rubbish of the rockets that disturbed the night’s silence, the same violence stalks unsuspecting citizens, because crime does not rest nor does it depend on a change of digits to fade its ominous and overwhelming presence.
The lesson of the day is that magic does not exist, nor do miracles happen in such a basic and pedestrian way as moving from December of one year to January of the next. On the contrary, it is necessary to remain alert and analyse the mistakes made: the childish enthusiasm for the auguries of a change of government, the cowardly silence in the face of abuses by legislators, that kind of civic numbness induced by many decades of repression, but also the selfishness of those who have something and do not wish to risk their precarious stability for those who have nothing.
The tsunami of war that has filled television screens with ruins and corpses, together with the tragedy of migrants – victims of war, hunger and violence in their homelands – should have awakened the collective consciousness a little, demonstrating with its resounding reality that in the face of great tribulations, human solidarity is important. The violence unleashed against civilian populations in nations whose only sin is the immense wealth of their subsoil or their strategic geographic position has given us a pretty good idea of the extent of the ambition of those countries that have grown rich as a result of their power of aggression.
Everything that has hit us during 2022 will continue to hit us in the new year: the loss of legal certainty in our third world countries; the increase in extreme poverty and the abuses of rulers; the indifference of the international community to violence against defenceless peoples.
The important thing, then, is to get involved and clear the mists of a joyful and late-night party without much relevance, whose din only camouflaged, for a few hours, the sadness of those who lost their jobs or those who had nothing to celebrate. The sun continues on its eternal path dragging a mismanaged planet, populated by beings incapable of living together in peace and bent on destroying their environment. Isolated efforts to convert advances in science into greater well-being for the people come up against the immense power of consolidated groups of companies dedicated to manipulating and transforming discoveries into more money for their shareholders.
If there is to be change in the rhythm of the days, let it be to involve the population in what happens to their future and that of their children and help awaken them from the complacent lethargy in which they have remained while their assets vanish into foreign banks, with no hope of return. May the protocol of the calendar work as an incantation to awaken her from the slumber in which she has been plunged by corruption, threat and fear of facing reality.
The sun continues to drag this battered and mismanaged planet along its path.
