Not again?

In this week's Camino a Ítaca, the space-time continum is once again altered. The cruel act happens this weekend in Europe and I believe the next in North America. Click over to read the original version published in Spanish in el HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

It’s that time of year again for that biannual exercise in futility that was supposed to end for good sometime last millennium. A time where we prove to ourselves that we can tamper with the very fabric of time itself and still manage to be late for work on Monday morning. It's a global tradition as old as Benjamin Franklin's bifocals and twice as bewildering. It's as if someone took a perfectly functional clock and decided to add a level of complexity that would make a combined team of NASA engineers blush.

One can't help but wonder if Daylight Saving Time is some sort of grand social experiment, designed to test the limits of human adaptability. It's a cruel joke, like giving a blindfolded man a Rubik's Cube and asking him to solve it while riding a unicycle on a tightrope. It's a test of our ability to reset all our appliances in our cars and homes, avoid being late for appointments, and resist the urge to strangle the next person who cheerfully reminds us that we "lost an hour of sleep."

I can't help but picture the ancient Romans, with their sundials and toga-clad timekeepers, looking down at us and laughing. They managed to build an empire without ever resetting their sundials. Yet we, with all our technological advances and wizardry, are confounded twice a year by the simple act of moving a few hands on a clock.

And let's not forget the impact on our sleep patterns. It's as if we're all subjected to a cosmic jet lag, except without the sheer joy of international travel. Our circadian rhythms are thrown into disarray, and it's as if our brains are trying to decipher an alien language, one where "7:00 AM" suddenly means "6:00 AM" and "time for bed" means "I'll just watch one more episode on Netflix." It’s like constantly crossing back and forth over the border into Portugal without any signs or GPS telling you where you are and trying to arrive on time for a lunch date.

But perhaps the most absurd aspect of Daylight Saving Time is the way it creates a rift in the space-time continuum of our homes. You see, not all clocks reset themselves automatically through WIFI, and so we must embark on a scavenger hunt through our own homes, searching for those rebellious timepieces that insist on holding onto the old time. The microwave blinks 12:00 in defiance, while the wall clock chimes the hour with an air of superiority. It's a battle of wills between man and machine, and the machines are winning.

Daylight Saving Time is a biannual exercise in chaos, confusion, and cosmic comedy. It's a reminder that no matter how advanced our society becomes, we can still be bamboozled by the simplest of temporal manipulations. It’s an indicator that we really can’t make up our minds about something so simple as to leave the clocks alone.

So, when you find yourself bleary-eyed and befuddled on the morning after the time change, remember that you are not alone in your struggle. It's a spectacle that would have made the gods of Mount Olympus chuckle with amusement, while us mortals, drenched in coffee and confusion, continue to struggle through this timeless farce.Top of Form

The End of an Era

In this week's Camino a Ítaca a look at how blind the far right is to the meaning of their own words. Click over to read the original piece published in el HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

I never thought I would see something like this happen. It seemed to go against everything the National Catholic party had ever demonstrated since its formation. It’s a move so contradictory to everything they had previously stood for, and so diametrically opposed to their normally clear and outright bias in favor of the Catholic Church, that it almost makes you wonder if it was a mistake.

In their coalition agreement with the PP, they even went out of their way to make it a point to favor the concertados over public schools which in their vast majority are run by the Church.

So imagine my surprise when I saw that the extreme right party, in coalition with the PP in Extremadura, were going beyond anything that the left would ever dare try. But against all this, the neo-fascist parliamentary group registered in the Assembly of Extremadura a proposal to encourage the government of Maria Guardiola to remove religion from schools.

I was completely taken aback when I read it. In the text they urged “the necessary measures to promote the immediate withdrawal of textbooks and educational material containing any type of indoctrination or potentially harmful content that may affect the innocence of minors.”.

The audacious move would mean an end to the long-standing, state sponsored torture that has been meted out in both public and private schools across the region since public schooling began.

No more textbooks indoctrinating children that the Christian god is the one and only true god. No more books terrorizing children with the idea that they or their loved ones would spend an eternity burning in molten sulfur for going against the bronze-aged precepts laid out in the bible. No more nightmares for the ‘sin’ of going to McDonald’s and eating a hamburger on Fridays. No more sleepless nights worrying that their classmates who don’t go to religion will suffer in a purgatory far worse than the clase de la nada they now have to endure as an empty, time wasting alternative to religion class.

The vague, blanket statements that the extreme right specializes in to provoke emotive reactions also cause confusion. They purposefully make it difficult to discern what they are really trying to say behind their negative slogans. Making it difficult to establish what they really mean with their inflammatory yet empty statements.

Rather than clarify what they are for, what the extreme right always does is to go on about what they are against. They vociferously claim to be against any type of ideology in class, but rarely, if ever do they specify what they support and what they propose in exchange.

The Spanish curriculum is centered on equality, inclusiveness, solidarity, integration, tolerance, no discrimination and democracy. If this is what they are against, it’s clear that their ideology goes radically against core constitutional values.

So, what do they stand for? The opposite perhaps?

Inequality, both economically and socially? Exclusiveness? Good Catholics and gente de bien on one side and ghettos with armbands for the rest? Apartness and intolerance for newcomers who have just arrived?

Their empty slogans remain extremely dangerous, but at least this time it may bring about something positive.