On Wednesday, like every year, Valentine’s Day was celebrated. Although, to be precise, we would only have to say that it was commemorated.
I read in the United States press that the anti-Valentine’s Day movement has gained strength. 10 years ago that day it had sales of 17.3 billion dollars. And this year purchases were expected to amount to 25.8 billion dollars.
Consumerism, it’s true. But a good part of the push comes from the sales of objects that reject love and friendship.
Sales of anti-Valentine’s Day t-shirts broke a record (24 percent more than in 2023), with legends such as Love is in the air, try not to breathe.
I read that the Feline Rescue Association in Orwings, Maryland, names a cat the buyer’s ex-partner, neuters it, and sends the video to the recipient for $25. Negotiation.
Or zoos that give a cockroach the requested name – after payment –, feed it to an animal and send the video to the requested address.
They are symptoms, minor if you will, of a society that is sick.
Loneliness is already a public health problem in the United States.
An “epidemic”, according to the report issued on May 3 of last year by the Department of Health of that country.
The decomposition of American society is visible in many of its streets, and is verifiable in statistics. They believe in nothing and nothing motivates them.
What do they care about liberal democracy?
What do they care about Ukraine?
Are they going to shed their blood in defense of freedom, as they did in Normandy?
Many people are completely indifferent to all of the above.
They are anecdotes of political and social decomposition that come to us from the United States.
There are more profound ones, from the denial of covid, the suicidal drug addiction that spreads like humidity, to the sidewalks with young people and adults drugged and drunk at 11 in the morning on Bourbon Street, New Orleans.
And so in Philadelphia, Baltimore, San Francisco…
Trump is the expression of that decadence.
A large sector of American society does not care that Trump wanted to violate the constitutional order. That he is a contumacious liar and a systematic violator of the law.
Nor does he care that he is a fan of Vladimir Putin, a destroyer of institutions, a slanderer and a destroyer of reputations.
Is that sector of society in the neighboring country the majority?
It won’t take long to find out. In November we will see if Americans choose to commit suicide as leaders of a civilization.
Not only the matter of a leader and those around him.
“Once the dog died, the rabies ended,” says an ingenious but wrong popular phrase.
As Rob Riemen points out in The art of being human, it is wrong to think that a group of fanatics, alone, can destroy a country, a democracy or a civilization. Without the support or indifference of a majority sector of society, no madness prospers to that degree.
Neither in the United States, nor Mexico.
When the truth does not matter, autonomous thought is the object of ridicule and contempt, self-criticism disappears and the democratic spirit of the population is weakened, there is no way out.
It is society that is sick.
Trump is the result of all of the above.
Americans will tell us, in November, if his illness is so widespread that it is incurable, in a terminal phase, or if he still has moral reserves to defeat the nightmare that grips him.
