Spanish views from a small town

I fear for our society. Last week, a young man in A Coruña was beaten to death. He was with a friend who was holding a video call with someone else, outside a recently opened night club and music bars. A brute and his girlfriend, thinking she was filming them, got belligerent and started shouting to her to stop filming them. The young man, Samuel, tried to explain it was merely a video call. The brute simply replied, "o paras de grabar, o te mato, maricón de mierda,"   (either you stop filming or I kill you, fucking fagot) and started punching Samuel.  After having the fight broken up by a passer-by, the brute and his girlfriend left. But, while Samuel was sitting, with lacerations on his face, and his friend helping him look for his phone, which had fallen, the brute returned with twelve friends. They beat Samuel until he was unconscious, calling him, "maricón de mierda."   (fucking fagot) After they had left, the friend, who couldn't do anything to stop them, ...

If yesterday I said justice will end up working out, today I have to say the opposite. Last week, amid the steep rise in Covid cases in several cities, Madrid foremost, the central government decreed a small lockdown, with no one allowed in or out of certain cities. (Cities of over a hundred thousand inhabitants, with an infection rate of over 500 per 100,000.)  Today, the Superior Court of the region of Madrid declared the lockdowns illegal without a general state of alarm declared, because they impinge upon individual rights. These are the same judges that upheld the rather lopsided and ineffectual restrictions the regional government imposed on only a part of affected areas, and that did not admit a case against the managers of various publicly owned elderly residences where many older people died because controls against the coronavirus were lax in the spring. Politics, much? That must be what some of the judges would like to see happen. Another national state of alarm would tu...

A ten year old boy is asked by his mother to put breakfast on the table. He says no and continues listening to music and playing a game on his €800 phone. She insists, and he smashes the phone against the floor in her general direction. She slaps him. That same boy, a year later and now eleven, goes to the door, announcing he's leaving home. His mother grabs him by the neck, inadvertently scratching him. Who's in the wrong? The boy or the mother? According to strict interpretation of Spanish law, the mother. Which is why the boy's father (separated from the mother) and the boy decided to denounce the mother for abuse. What the state attorney was asking for against the mother was thirty-five days social jobs, a year and a half prohibited from owning or carrying firearms, and a restraining order of fifty meters from her son for six months. The judge, however, absolved her of all wrongdoing. According to him, the child, in his testimony, was cold and calculating, and showed ...