My better half is apoplectic

She is one of a pre­cious few Cana­di­ans who have set­tled in Cat­alo­nia. She is worldly, rea­son­able, fair and con­sid­ered. (That is why to a great de­gree we are here). But when she is roused there is hell to pay.

In­ca­pable of recog­nis­ing his dire in­ca­pa­bil­i­ties, the free­wheel­ing Trump has a gross carte blanche en­gen­dered by lies, prej­u­dices and sound­bites and is pick­ing fights all over the place. His ar­ro­gance knows no bounds. Re­gard­ing Iso­la­tion­ism and a wafer thin grasp of diplo­macy, im­mi­gra­tion and his fore­most re­spon­si­bil­ity, namely to en­gen­der peace, har­mony and global well­be­ing, Trump is, to talk in terms he may grasp, mak­ing a gross hash of things. He and his he­do­nis­tic co­horts are bulls in our – our – china shop and al­ready we hear and can see del­i­cate prin­ci­ples being smashed.

Im­mi­gra­tion, as in­ter­na­tion­al­ist Cata­lans have long ap­pre­ci­ated, can en­gen­der well­be­ing, un­der­stand­ing and eco­nomic growth. Spain’s wider em­brac­ing of the prin­ci­ple is reap­ing re­wards and buck­ing eco­nomic trends: tens of na­tion­al­i­ties work side by side to bol­ster the econ­omy and to show at a crit­i­cal time in world af­fairs that there is a bet­ter way. But it only re­ally works if peo­ple wel­come it and take a mea­sured view. So­ci­ety has to be se­cure enough to forge har­mony not dis­cord. How good to read last year that the ma­jor­ity of Cata­lans sup­port this evo­lu­tion for the com­mon good.

If you see a cou­ple wan­der­ing about wear­ing Canada Is Not For Sale t-shirts and hats, that will prob­a­bly be us. One of the first peo­ple we met when we came here 25 years ago, queu­ing pa­tiently in the vil­lage bread shop, was an el­derly lady who had come home to her vil­lage for her last years. I was wear­ing a Cana­dian T-shirt. She had a Cana­dian ac­cent. She had been there, raised her fam­ily there, after being forced into exile post civil war. She had never waivered as a re­pub­li­can. And there have been oth­ers, too, from these south­ern Cata­lan moun­tains, who have a bond with Canada.

If you have ever been you will know they are fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent from Amer­i­cans, that the cul­ture, though in­flu­enced in so many ways by the neigh­bours to the south, is more mea­sured and far more worldly.

That should strike a chord. Mean­while the tem­per­a­ture rises in our house every time the radio tells of an­other Trump/Vance de­range­ment. I think the fools are al­ready ruing the day they picked a fight with a far more im­por­tant na­tion.