There is still room for tenderness

By Mónica Hernández

Sometimes I think that humanity is doomed to disappear, because we are a species that attacks ourselves, plundering what is left of the planet and killing each other, for whatever reasons. It doesn't matter if it is for religious reasons (the pile of dead in the name of God has been the highest since the world has been a world), for reasons of revenge or for what we like to call justice, which it may be, or perhaps it only serves as a justification for not looking with horror within ourselves. Here I refer to the war in Palestine. It seemed so in October and it seems only fair in February that the Israelis are still searching for and releasing their hostages (at least, in body. In spirit, I imagine that they will always remain prisoners of the horror of what they have lived through), but the crudeness of the "payment" that the Palestinians have made and continue to make for the actions of a few terrorists seems every day more difficult to believe, if not to justify. As in quarrels between brothers: it is no longer a question of who started it, but of how the quarrel will end . 

Looking the other way doesn't lift my spirits, not even with Valentine's Day looming in my eyes and wallet. I would like to think that love also haunts people's hearts, but to my very personal way of thinking, the cloying pink and red everywhere, inviting me to buy something to show my feelings, has the opposite effect: it repels me, it drives me away. Maybe my marketing background makes me doubt all the invitations that try to seduce me to buy roses, chocolates, teddy bears and drink pink bubbles.