Dear friends,

Pedro Aznar is probably my favorite living Argentinian composer, musician and vocalist.  I recently came across this short message which he posted on the Internet and I asked my friend Ana (thanks Ana!) from the LatinAmerican Saker blog to provide a quick translation.  Here is the original video in Spanish followed by the transcript!

Pedro Aznar reflects about Corona Virus

The question remains. I watch the empty streets on TV with a silent soul; cities appear like mockups in an apocalyptic film about a war where everything still stands, but there is no one left.

I hear the neighbors decorate a quite disquiet as best as possible. My friends are barely able to hide their despair. They either take care of their parents or cry about them and hardly know what to tell their children.

We share lists of recommended films, books or inspirational sentences, jokes and good wishes with a half mast joy, like those greetings to far relatives in a hospital waiting room of a terminal patient.

I fall asleep after a couple of rounds of remote-control zapping, while I ask myself, like everyone else, how long still?

I get outraged on the bad taste of the opportunists who try to catch a minute of air by either saying or doing some demagogical nonsense. I exasperate about those beasts who overflow with false alarms. I get sick and tired of always hearing the same and the lack of another subject.

I understand, accept and comply with the big pause-button imposed to the world, and ask myself whether, we will rise in a better shape at the other side of fear. We could have done this before; we could have stopped everything to avoid succumbing.

Why are we unable to stop, shuffle and hand again, in a world that hastily rushes to the abyss?

Governments come up now with ideas to sustain the economy, through subsidies and tax cuts, and giving incentives. Why did they not do so to stop the nefarious paradigm and avoid the derailment we were heading for, instead of tightening ahead the throat of the planet with a claw of filth and greed?

It doesn’t matter who started the pulsed. Whether the virus was planted or not. The question remains: when all this has come to pass, will we still allow everything to stay as it was before?