When some of us youngsters were frightened by that movie that predicted the end of the world in 2012, more than one old person consoled us with a certain pity and a wealth of reason, assuring us that the world ends every day for those who die. In retrospect, it doesn't seem so much like consolation, but rather a repositioning of the focus of our concern. Apocalyptic theories make us fear meteorites, extraterrestrials, or magma, but they don't tell us, or not clearly, that along the way there are issues just as, or even more, sinister; just as, or even more, lethal.
You don't need a meteorite to end the lives of many people, nor a nuclear weapon to wipe out, more or less quickly, a city and a town; and there are human beings just as, or even more, dangerous than those portrayed in films about aliens, which sometimes don't seem to have sought inspiration in a galaxy "far, far away."
The "end of the world" is not something improbable or remote, but rather it happens, it plays out, in many ways every day, on this very planet.
For example, in Lebanon, some 2,800 people have been killed since March 2, 2026, by foreign bombs, from the same source as those that have killed more than 3,000 in Iran, including high-ranking leaders, also this year. More than 70,000 have been killed in Palestine since October 2023.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, civilian deaths are being recorded by the dozens amidst conflicts that no one explains or fully understands, while mine collapses claim hundreds upon hundreds of lives in a single blow, all for minerals and the corresponding profits that, sooner rather than later, end up thousands of kilometers to the north, beyond the borders of Africa.
"Damn dance of the dead," sang Luis Eduardo Aute, and it is a "dance" in which everything is connected, however far removed one choreography may seem from another; a dance that continues…
What is our place in this dance? How alien does it seem to us? How distant? The latest statements and measures taken by certain “conductors of the orchestra” regarding us can give us an idea.
And neither in Africa, nor in Southwest Asia, nor in Latin America are they merely going after lives: the earthly, concrete, material world… is what lies at the heart of and mediates this farce.
"Earth, air, water," Silvio Rodríguez summed it up years ago. But alongside all these things, there is also fire, the poet reminded us, and in certain places, there is, there will be, a need to take it all or nothing, if it comes to be sought.
And in the meantime, we have to manage to live and make our own film, our own song, without excesses or a lack of romanticism, without extraterrestrials, with the appropriate dose of rage and tenderness, or whatever we can manage, like someone walking amidst madness, humming that telenovela theme song: Everyone wonders who we are and where we're going… By the light of the streetlamps, poets and lovers. Everyone wonders who we are and where we're going… With our feet on the ground (alive), here we dream.
