Perhaps some ideas were born from the pandemic that this war now wants to cancel
For several weeks on this blog there have been interesting articles that deal with the monstrous war that suddenly swept across the West from various points of view.
It is hard to maintain this thread also because the continuous succession of news in newspapers and television news gives us the feeling that everything is being said, everything is clear, too clear. There is an update every thirty minutes, you hardly have time to digest what you have read and a new article is already out. Yet, at the same time, one has the feeling of not fully grasping the meaning of what is happening.
I agree with Marco Michelini and Luigia Lazzaro when they say that the violence that took us by surprise is frightening because it is meaningless. And I am also convinced that the Grassi high school kids, authors of the article published last week, are right in contrasting beauty with the horror that is affecting us. But I think that beauty is not enough, not in the face of the madness of dragging humanity back a century. Maybe we need to try to better understand what this violence is directed against, and we need to take the time. Breathe, take your time looking for the answers.
I don’t think I can find all the answers now, but I would try to start with the one that shook the world in the previous two years: the pandemic. They were very hard years, terrible for the losses that many people have suffered, but they forced us to deal with nature and our previous way of life.
In people’s heads the images of the dolphins at the port of Ostia during the lockdown were printed on fire, the deer free in the streets, the clear rivers, the clean sea. Images that have forced us to think about our impact on the planet. To the need to change in order to arrive, not at ever greater economic growth, but at a different development. Those feelings made us imagine a different possible future of which we had lost hope (who knows when and who knows why).
Another new thing that has happened in the last two years is that people between 35 and 45 have refused permanent jobs, permanent jobs. The newspapers called them “the great resignation”. But how? Precisely that generation that had made precariousness a way of life? Those who fought for a permanent contract to be able to have a mortgage, to be able to have children? Yes, them! Or rather, just us. I don’t know what exactly happened, but in our minds the idea came that we have to work to live and not live to work as it has been in the last 20 years of economic crisis. It will seem like a trivial thing, but let’s think about it: if people pretend to breathe again, to spend their lives in relationships, passions, emotions and are willing to earn less to have all this, what could happen? Maybe it could happen that all of us decide to say “no”, that we learn not to be afraid of dying of hunger and cold because we have experienced that having many things (perhaps too many), but no longer having an identity and energy to spend on what one truly loves is much worse. And maybe it could happen that, doing all these thoughts, we start laughing in the face of those who have more power than us.
Then you have to put the fear back in people’s heads. Forcing her to think again about survival, about violence.
I wonder if this is why this war has broken out. Perhaps to never let people discover that the joy of living can exist?
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