The world walks in iron boots across porcelain. We still say “democracy” with crumb-laced mouths — as if it were fresh bread, though it’s stale, crumbling, forgotten at the bottom of the basket. Gaza burns beyond the grasp of time, and empathy seems to have melted alongside it. On television, the dead are blurred — as if dignity were copyrighted.

Trump speaks. Netanyahu acts. People bleed.

Populism is a curtainless theater, where applause precedes the monologue and enemies are sculpted from fear. Each leader a caricature: fists raised, promises ablaze, truth hammered into slogans. “We will rebuild!” they shout. But first, they raze what still breathes.

How many lives fit inside the silence of a pressed button?

Levitsky and Ziblatt warned us, yes — but few listen when decline is slow. Democracies don’t die, they starve. Picked apart at the edges, hollowed out from within like fruit gnawed by time.

And us?
We still write. We still name the horror. We still dare to call “life” what others would reduce to ash. Because where there is language, there is tether. And where there is tether, there is humanity — even in shards, even in sand.

© Beatriz Esmer