At this point in the Digital Age, it could be assumed that everyone already knows what are the anathemas, the taboo issues, those things that cannot be sullied; and its antonyms, themes that always triumph online and generate immediate support. Not even the new age network, the one that seems to have a hegemony of at least a decade, TikTok, which has broadened the catalog of what we love with its millions of homemade choreographies, has managed to emancipate itself from that certainty that it consolidated a long time ago. decades YouTube and that Instagram has ratified: planet Earth is the empire of cute cats.
Kitty owners know they have a Tom Cruise of the nets in their house. It does not matter what the adventure of the pussycat is because it will work like a shot on social networks. And if he is small and has trouble getting his body to hold his bobblehead, even better. What’s more, thanks to the Netflix documentary series Don’t F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer, 2019, we know without a shadow of a doubt that someone capable of doing a kitten is very likely a serial killer, a very dangerous criminal.
In reality, this transversal and unconditional love, capable of bringing Tyrians and Trojans to an agreement, is extensible to all pets, to everything that we can love without measure because we attribute unconditional innocence and vulnerability to it. For example, a tree. The irrepressible anger of that broken and sullied love – that the Goya winner for animation, Unicorn Wars narrates so well – was experienced in August 2022 by the archdiocese and the Seville city council with the felling of a centenary ficus in the Triana neighborhood, a crime that sparked a solidarity movement that swept the country with the intensity of the earthquake in Turkey. We are like that, we empathize better with an august tree than with thousands of victims of famine, war, tyranny or plague. It’s okay, there’s nothing terrible or shameful about it, humans must accept our unfathomable paradoxes and try to get reason to correct those sentimental excesses.
That is why it is so shocking that the mayor’s office of Madrid, three months after opening the polls, has decided to launch the reform of an old project to expand a Metro station, which, to avoid cutting traffic, chooses to cut down almost 300 adult trees of Madrid Río, an eight-kilometre park next to the Manzanares, a legacy of mayor Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, which (indebtedness apart) was the most important urban transformation of the last century in the capital. The matter spread like wildfire in networks and on Saturday, almost without seeing it coming, thousands of people from Madrid gathered in the park to stop the logging. It is surprising that in the middle of 2023, the mayor José Luis Martínez Almeida still ignores the non-negotiable digital dogma: “Every time you cut down a tree, God strangles a kitten.”
