Spanish views from a small town

Today marks the moment I have done another trip around our tired sun.  I have been thinking lately about the times I have been plunked in. There are moments I wish I had been born earlier, to avoid this apparent prelude to the destruction of our environment and our civilization. Yet, past moments were not wonderful, either. They seem simpler in retrospect, but nothing is quite as simple as it seems. There is a show on one of our public channels, where they show music clips of songs popular in this country in times gone by. Watching some of them, remembering when some of the songs came out, seeing people wearing clothes and hairstyles soooo popular in my youth, I felt an anguish of wishing myself back. It seems so simple, life in the seventies and eighties. No worries over the rising temperatures, no worries over whether Putin will push the nuclear button, no worries over living. But there were other worries. At the same time I wished myself back, I remembered that there were worrie...

Today is Women's Day. Today, while in the West we are still struggling for equal pay for equal work, and to change social norms about women, in the East, women are struggling for survival. Ukrainian women, their menfolk forced to stay behind to fight, are evading bombs and missiles to lead their families to safe havens in the West. Most of them reach their destination. But some are being tricked into human trafficking, it seems, by strangers coming up to them, promising them and their children a place to sleep.  Of course, since it is European women this is happening to, it's suddenly something to get angry about. But it's been happening to countless women in countless third world countries, as they marched through them, trying to reach the relative safety of Europe, escaping from their troubled or war-torn homes. Yet, because those women's skins are not pink and cream, nor do they have blue eyes, they are ignored.  Much has been made these days of a Ukrainian woman, wh...