Déjà Vu

The month of August started with the sad memory that it is 72 years since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where humanity discovered with horror the atomic hell of the war. The killer cloud in the shape of a radioactive mushroom should have turned all past, present and future leaders into pacifists. Nonetheless, there is something terrifying in our own history that makes leaders understand the power that comes from constant threats of blood and fire. Trump and Kim Jong Un have taken us back to the worrying feeling of the Cold War, where the nuclear threat was present in the environment.

We have spent weeks experiencing the distressing sensation of living déjà vu after déjà vu. American white supremacists armed to the teeth march through a peaceful city in the South shouting Nazi slogans. A woman dies, run down and murdered in a premeditated act by one of them. The tension is felt across the country. There is anger and despair at the images of Americans defending genocidal slogans that incite hatred, war between families and destruction.

The history of our most recent past is full of a dense and ominous smoke. It is a toxic specter of unbreathable air that turns into an apocalyptic cloud and represents our end as a civilization. The smoke coming from the chimneys of the crematoriums in the Nazi concentration camps, from the atomic bombs, from the crosses burned by the Ku Klux Klan which accompanied the lynchings, from the torches that celebrate hate and adorn the most sinister marches of these times … all of these fumes mix in an atmosphere that cares very little for our existence.

The smoke, this smoke, this cloud that grows with the disintegration of the values of humanity, the end of empathy, inequality, and indifference, will destroy human beings and will rub us off the face of the earth. We are fanning a fire which emits an unbreathable smoke that feeds off genocides, massacres, murders and hatred.

Our extinction does not need an asteroid to hit the earth and trigger a global winter. That’s what we are for, with a history full of poisonous fragments, of scenes that we forget and repeat with the selfish naiveté of those that think themselves the gods of their times. The lack of vision, humanity and commitment of our leaders will fuel the fire for the worst of the smoke.