Sara Lazzaro

We are in April 2022 and in the local newspapers of Latina comes out the news of the cancellation of an assembly related to sex education in a well-known high school in the city The Assembly had been organized by the students and should have seen the presence of doctors, psychologists and prominent guests but the indignant reaction of some parents, supported (alas!) by some teachers, it resulted in its temporary suspension.

Once upon a time I spent an ordinary petty bourgeois life in a quiet town in the province of Lazio. The “edges” I had diligently always followed them all: high school, graduation, work, marriage, children … Yet I had the clear feeling of surviving inside a castle, a bit like that of fairy tales, golden, reassuring, apparently perfect but in reality cold and dark.

To reject war requires a new thought.

It’s true, it seems who knows how long since last month we expressed our desire to want to get out of the schemes and canons imposed by a society so “standardized”, so tremendously similar to a golden cage …and instead …. 21st century, February 2022, a senseless war breaks out that brings death and suffering, which transforms three and a half million people into castaways of a new desolation, humanity in disarray, catapulted into scenarios that seemed out of time, victim of an inhuman game of Risiko.

A few days ago my twenty-one year old son asked me point-blank: << Mom but if somone refuses to leave for the war is he considered a deserter?>>. The war in Ukraine has just begun but the question, I don’t know why, takes me by surprise. While I try to answer something reassuring I realize that I feel helpless and inadequate, as if I had not considered, until that moment, that yes he is “only” twenty-one years old, but the images and news that arrive like meteorites in our homes frighten him, anguish him.

November 2021: On Netflix is inserted “Strappare lungo i bordi”, Zerocalcare’s animated series, a famous Roman cartoonist. This miniseries traces the life of the author, over the eight episodes proposed, touching cross-cutting issues to an entire generation.