Ah, the sweet universality of it all....

Extracted from a letter to the editor in El País last week:

There's a deaf man worse than the one who simply doesn't want to hear: the one who keeps shouting at the top of his lungs that nothing can be heard so that the rest of us can't hear anything, either.

The writer was commenting on the current climate in Spanish politics, but somehow I had no trouble applying his very wise words to all kinds of countries and conversations...