Just a few days ago, on October 12th, while the Puerta del Sol encampment for the right to housing was trying to keep Maricarmen’s memory alive, a group of young people—many of them minors—appeared with flags and Francoist symbols to berate and insult the campers. The image is hard to stomach: adolescents born in the 21st century championing a dictator against other young people who are simply asking for a place to live. A few weeks ago, I wrote here that Maricarmen had given us a lesson in dignity; on the day of the nation’s maximum exaltation, some responded to her with the eagle emblem and raised arms. This is not an isolated incident. Here, too, we have heard “vivas to Franco” that have ended up in the newspapers, and any secondary school teacher will be able to tell you what is heard in the hallways or what circulates in the students’ WhatsApp groups.

For an essay I am writing, for some months now I have been immersed in the ascetic film work of Robert Bresson, one of the masters of transcendental cinema according to the theorist and filmmaker Paul Schrader. Two of Bresson's best films, Diary of a Country Priest and Mouchette, are based on texts by the French novelist and essayist Georges Bernanos, who now returns to Catalan bookstores with what is probably his masterpiece: A Diary of My Times. La Nova Editorial Moll is publishing the completely revised translation by Antoni-Lluc Ferrer, which had to wait forty years to be released in its original edition, and it does so with notes by the historian Josep Massot i Muntaner, who went as far as to declare that this very harsh book represents, with absolute fidelity, the abominable disasters that took place in Mallorca during the Civil War.

Twenty-nine editions of Teatre de Barra are many, almost very many. Therefore, it deserves that the sequence number goes in capital letters, but it also happens that day after day they fill to the brim the chairs that surround the counters of the different venues where the different stories unfold. Stories that for the occasion speak of the eighties, and it must be said that a high percentage of regular spectators of the event were already there. Five plays five.

At the beginning of 2011, I found a note one day under my office door about an event called ‘The State of Malaise’. Added by hand was: “This is it!”. It came from a student, frustrated for some time by the lack of channels for political—and intellectual—expression for his generation. Shortly after, this same young man launched the hashtag #acampapalma, and in no time, Plaza de España became the Plaza of Iceland, in the wake of the 15-M movement.

Last September 27th was World Rivers Day and in the Balearic Islands almost no one remembered it. Perhaps because we think that we do not have rivers here. But we do have them: they are our torrents, which the Hydrological Plan recognizes as water bodies in the river category. There are 70 of them, totaling about 550 kilometers. We only talk about them when a flash flood arrives and the water reminds us of where it used to pass before we built over it. Once the storm has passed, they return to oblivion.

For a number of years, psychology has been socially recognized as one more health profession, as well as a resource for the care and improvement of the mental health of individuals, families, organizations, and also on a community scale. In this vein, the fact that politics echoes the importance of mental health, and that they signed the Balearic Pact for emotional well-being and mental health in 2023 in a unified manner, is a complete success. The same applies to the creation in this legislature of the General Directorate for Mental Health.