Spanish views from a small town

This new continuation of my blog of the plague year will continue with numbers. Until when, I don't know. Perhaps until there's a change in the situation one way or another. Or perhaps until I'm fed up with it, and you, too. Let's admit it, these are not normal times. Meanwhile, life, and its usual problems, continues. Language problems, for example, and I'm not talking about the difficulty to learn English or other foreign languages. People tend to refer to the language spoken in Spain as "Spanish", but it's not. The majority language spoken here is Castilian. The idea of "Spanish" was encouraged by Franco to maintain the image of unity and One Spain . There are many other languages spoken here, and they all make up the Spanish languages of Spain.  There are three other co-official languages in Spain: Galician, Catalonian, and Basque. (Galego, Catalán, and Euskera.) Galego looks like a cross between Portuguese and Castilian, Catalán like...

Hatred is a loaded word. It is loaded with all our deepest fears and most rancid beliefs. It is a rottening of the mind, with its stench and filth emanating whenever odium is declared toward anyone. The reek coming today from certain groups is nauseating, and has already caused at least one death in Virginia. Some of that reek is strong here in Spain, as well. Though the majority of Spaniards accept people from all over the world, there are some who consider immigrants the bane of society. These infelicitous souls think that immigrants are somehow favored by the authorities over the indigenous population. In Madrid an association has sprung up dedicated to giving out food and shelter to the homeless and other desperate people. But to qualify, those asking for help must be Spanish, not foreigners. This association, Hogar Social Madrid, initially occupied an abandoned building, and were thrown out by the police. They went on to occupy another building, where the judge still hasn't ...

Today is the first election in France, to weed out all the extra candidates, and narrow the field down to two, from which number the President of the Republic will be chosen next month. Since the Brexit referendum last year, and the Dutch elections this year, it is the election that will have the most influence on the future of Europe. In a world where national elections have international repercussions, everyone is worried. I have seen pictures already of long lines at polling places set up in foreign countries for French citizens. Everyone wants to have their say. The five major candidates are different, and some of their views remind one of others, elsewhere. Marine LePen is the scariest of all. She is completely anti-Europe, anti-immigrant, anti-anything-that-is-not-pure-French-all-the-way-back-to-Charlemagne. After the firefight that killed a police officer in Paris last week, she screamed that the terrorist attacks wouldn't have happened if the terrorists hadn't been ...

The United Kingdom voted yesterday to leave the European Union. Holy cow. My world, Europe, is convulsing and twitching into a new shape. I had accepted it would continue as I had gotten to know it at least until I was no longer here, but now it's morphing into a new shape within my lifetime. Again. Nothing is forever, not even countries and their borders. When I was a child, the Berlin Wall, East and West, Nato and Warsaw Pact, seemed ordained to last forever. I remember as a child waiting for a much lauded vacation in Spain with my parents, reading the airplane tickets bought months in advance. Back then, a ticket was the original copy stapled to as many carbon copies as stopovers were necessary, with one final carbon to be kept for your records. On the back was the fine print, and I would read it, including what the airline included in its liability if a part of the trip were to take the passenger to one of the Warsaw Pact countries. I remember looking it up in one of the ...

Europe as a region seems to have a short memory span. Around seventy years ago at the end of World War Two, it asked for clemency as millions of its citizens began migrating for many reasons; looking for loved ones, a new chance at life, or as a result of ethnic cleansing and redistribution of borders. They tried to go mostly to North America, Australia, and South America. Now Europe is being asked for clemency by millions from the Middle East and Africa escaping from bloody civil wars, uprisings, and meteorological devastation. But Europe has become deaf. These days we are seeing news about the island of Kos, in Greece, just off the coast of Turkey. Thousands upon thousands of refugees from the Middle East, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, all the way to Pakistan, are arriving each day on boats. But it's not just Kos, it's all the other Greek islands that are right up against Turkey's coastline. In the month of July, about fifty thousand people arrived in those islands. I...