La Hormiga Negra

The most loved children magazine of my times in Buenos Aires was called Billiken. .It was cheap yet too expensive for my penniless refugee parents to afford it. Nonetheless I  formed nice collection by trading secondhand cartoon magazines (Flash Gordon, Superman, Batman, El Eternauta, Misterix etc.) on the Sunday morning markets. One of the permanent figures of Billiken was La Hormiga Negra, the Black Ant, which in those innocent times was the model of untiring diligence, of carefully husbanding one resources, of saving for winter, always ready to lend a hand to her colleges.  She was always neatly dressed and polite. In one cartoon that I remember we saw the Hormiga Negra navigating on a leaf, crossing a small stream, crying desperately: "The World Is Ending!". Nearby, the Monkey told her: "Calm down, the world is not ending, may be a little Hormiga Negra is drowning."

Reading American papers, the collective cry coming forth strong is "America is Burning", the Pandemic is killing us, Trump is leading us to a Race War, etc. Then I remember, it is not America dying, it is the little journalist becoming irrelevant and superannuated. BTW, Billiken was the name of the German founder of the magazine.