Farewell to the cursed year
A few days ago I reread Anne Frank's Diary with that uneasiness that has flooded us in the last long months in this war, as French President Emmanuel Macron said, against an invisible enemy that has already left a trail of dead and millions of victims all over the world.
I have never understood in such depth what that restless little girl, whose freedom and that of her family had been restricted by the Nazis and who were unable to make decisions, intended to write in that confidential diary as a mute witness to her daily life.
This pandemic has turned us into hostages of the politicians, the government, the scientists, the virus and even our own fear; in each war only those who resist the most survive, those who have resilience and strength, sometimes those who invent their own underworld within the world without certainties and live their fantasy like that crazy man from Mauthausen who after the end of the Second World War recovered his sanity and became a happy survivor.
A few days ago, the Fundación del Español Urgente (the Urgent Spanish Foundation), chose the word confinement as the most outstanding of 2020, it is true, that no other word has been repeated more times and with such insistence in different languages.
For me, personally, the two words of the year are: survival and resilience; the first one, we have experienced it in our flesh as much as the second one, especially those of us who experienced a hard confinement where you could only go out to buy food, go to the bank, the pharmacy or the hospital as it happened in Spain and in other nearby countries.
This year is ending and we would all like to see the SARS-CoV-2 plague go away forever and recover our daily lives from second one in 2021... however, we know that it will not be like that.
Anne Frank, in her diary, narrated her personal moment with a dose of hope, of ingenuity, she didn't really know if she would have a future, nor when and if that absurd war that had turned the Jews into cannon fodder would end... she also didn't understand, if tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, they would still be hidden or if, finally, at some point they would be found...
She only had her dreams and her feelings left, as much hers as ours, because this cursed pandemic will not steal them from us; we have no certainties and perhaps we can plan very much in the short term because we depend on the decisions of others and the course of the health emergency.
I have decided this year to unlearn many of the clichés under which we have been educated and guided to remind myself, above all, that I do not want to be part of a materialistic society, but a humanistic one.
A few days ago, Tedros Adhanom, head of the World Health Organization (WHO), warned that worse pandemics than the current ones will come and not in such a long time; I understand that this is a wake-up call, especially for our politicians, whose decisions are translated into annual budgets in which they decide whether to spend more, or less, or even cut back on health care spending and hospital infrastructure, as well as on medical personnel.
I do understand Adhanom's position, although I do so with a certain amount of weariness as I do not like being scared; while it is a fact that we need politicians who are committed to the health of all of us, this is the ultimate lesson of 2020: without health we are nothing; no distinction is made here between rich and poor.
More health and fewer weapons, less expenditure on defence, although paradoxically this year global military spending increased again and did so in the countries most severely affected by the coronavirus such as China, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom.
The pandemic and its course this year have neither curbed ambitions nor strategies nor slowed down the race to rearm, a blatant immorality in the midst of so much pain.
The United Kingdom has become the epitome of the COVID-19 tragedy, with hospitals far from collapsing and with the warning that it does not have enough oxygen for its hospitals. It announced last November that it will boost its military spending with an extra $22 billion for the next four years and will become, after the United States, the second NATO member country that will contribute most to its defence.
Just when the British would have expected more spending and investment in health infrastructure, Premier Johnson is giving the Defence Ministry a boost, making it the largest budget in the past three decades...
To my dear readers, my greatest wish for health and strength