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.
There are no good or bad, there are geopolitical dynamics perhaps too complex to fully understand, but one fact seems very clear to us: there are two type of people, the inhabitants of two lands, both overwhelmed by decisions that they do not agree with and by a violence that they have not chosen. The first word, then, that comes to mind is the adjective monstrous … it is monstrous the war that divides families, that takes away husbands, fathers, brothers … the subway stations used as shelters are monstrous, where you live with nothing, without food or medicines… where improvised maternity wards are equipped … the bombs on hospitals, the cities reduced to dust, the streets still smoking and the corpses on the ground are monstrous ….. To get to an end sooner or later?… Who knows to what end and at what price…
Perhaps the difficulty is precisely this: being able to find a meaning to something that does not have it. But another word comes to our aid, beauty. In this absurd theater there are people who die for no reason, who cannot live life or who have to run away from their affections, from their places, because there are “powerful” men who do not know happiness, do not know the beauty of life or perhaps want to destroy it in others. And how can we oppose it? How can we defend life and beauty?
The reflections read in the article “THE WORDS I CANNOT SAY” by Luigia Lazzaro then come back strongly, which seem to have given substance to our thoughts, even to those aspects that perhaps we ourselves could not express. In the last lines we are quoted directly and asked if we are aware that “human beings are all born equal“. Initially it seemed to us a silly, almost trivial question, as if we had been asked: <<How much is 2+2? >>. Then we stopped to think and we realized that it is not a trivial question. We listened to the grandparents of some of us who lived through the Second World War and who vividly remember the deportations of people with whom until the day before they had played and shared life. We suddenly realized that even today the idea that another human being can suddenly become the different to be erased, the enemy to be eliminated, exists and makes one shudder. We came across, for example, a television program, in which a press conference of a political party was shown, which told how to organize a humanitarian mission to help the refugees of Ukraine. One of the politicians wanted to point out: <<this war touches me more because they are more like us>>. Then we realized that the equality of human beings, which for us is a fact, is not for everyone and this is frightening…. The politician distinguished this war from others in which people whose religion and appearance are different from ours die and he did it in a disarming way, making us think that the concept of equality is not so obvious and obvious. The initial reaction to all this was one of bewilderment and anger, but later the awareness grew of wanting and having to do more to try to defeat such a thought, of having to fight more and more to break down the violent idea that “divides” human beings, that denies their equality, that also uses words as bombs, that hides behind a homeland or a flag to destroy everyone’s chances. <<And if instead – as Cecilia Strada wrote on a Facebook post – human life was more important than the “Fatherland”? What if being able to see your children grow up was more important than fighting for your nation?>>.(https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10222739552143532&id=1416427561)
What if human beings instead learned to defend their beauty?… It’s true, we need new words … but now more than ever we have to shout these words!
Denise Cristofoli
Emanuele Gardiolo
Sara Nulli
Irene Tari
(studenti 5BS del Liceo scientifico G B Grassi di Latina)
Leave a Reply