In Spain there is more talking than listening. And words have stopped being tools to understand us to become weapons to hurt us. The bad thing is that in our time they arrive by land, sea and air, like the armies of the 20th century. The most unbridled words impact us on social networks, where there is no brake and where anyone with a sentence can do as much damage as a remote-controlled missile, if the aggressor aims well at the right moment. Ryszard Kapuscinski warned: “Wars never start with the first shot, but with the change of language”.
No one escapes polarization. It’s reckless to turn the other cheek because the easiest thing is to be ripped off. Few dare to demand explanations because this only leads to renewing the insults.
Most of the parties ask for dialogue, when they only listen to their own monologues. The only thing that knows the right and the left, the crazy and the sane, is what Juan José Millás warned us: “Reality is made of words, so whoever dominates the words, dominates the reality”. It should not be surprising that, from the moment we wake up, words fall from the sky like hail, ready to leave us speechless rather than without arguments.
José María Aznar dedicated his speech yesterday at the campus to opposing the amnesty and a referendum on self-determination, raising the tone of the attacks on Pedro Sánchez. His language was extremely forceful and aggressive. I recall one of his sentences: “There is no State that does not embarrass its citizens in which a letter of naturalization is granted to a fugitive from justice and it is accepted that an eventual government depends on the will of a coup d’état” .
The spokeswoman for the acting Spanish Government, Isabel Rodríguez, did not stop to answer him that whoever lied to the Spanish people repeatedly when he was in government has no credibility, no political or moral value. And he wondered if the next thing Aznar will ask for will be a raise.
The waters of X, formerly Twitter, went down yesterday full of detritus because of this controversy. I remembered the sentence of Marilynne Robinson, winner of the Pulizer Prize in 2005: “I miss civilization and I want it back.”