Stories and News No. 1304
We often fight over the different angles from which we observe the most varied issues, both those that touch us closely and others, which concern people whose tragedies we cannot imagine.
For example, war or peace, join the fight or stand by, send weapons or only medicines, or not even the latter.
At the same time, I think that when we try to absorb the points of view of those who pay the highest price, seriously, dividing or even clashing against each other could be much more difficult.
That’s why I can't help but broaden my gaze on the inhabitants of a portion of the globe at this time particularly marred by different but almost equally tragic events.
In the middle, to separate the those destinies there is once again water. Nothing new in the century we are living, because at these latitudes it is the journey that traces the path between the waves that captures the most conflicting emotions, like the stories that matters, between the affection moved by the purest human solidarity up to the least tolerable hatred, the one generated by madness and loneliness.
In this case it is a watercourse of ambiguous dimensions. It's a sea, but it's not as vast as many of its brothers, nor as ruthless and brutal. Yet, they call it Black, an adjective that often, still today, evokes something grim and malignant.
Nonetheless, it is at the poles of the latter that two different events are currently holding the front pages of newspapers all over the world. Or maybe it's the other way around, but it's also the same, as the terrible images and heartbreaking words overlap and blend into each other.
The differences exist, thank goodness, they are there, evident, a minimally pragmatic bystander could rightly says.
In the north people die from human fire, rather than friendly. Indeed, not at all such, according to the rhetoric of the war genre, moreover confirmed in its most elementary version: there is an invader and an invaded one. And there are the others, all around, deciding how to do and, if to do, what to do - as well as wondering what they should have done before - while bombs bite, bullets tear apart and missiles literally erase entire passages of a written history on the pages that many consider their own earth.
At the same time, people have been dying at the hands of the latter, to the south of the same sea with an unusual name. Life shakes from one instant to the next and collapses, changing its face and transforming into the exact opposite of who should support and protect you. On this side of the story there is no enemy to point the finger at other than fate. At most those who should have been more shrewd in foreseeing the cruel whims of destiny, better reinforcing the levees that on the map should keep us safe from our own planet. Even if the latter's grievances are often more justified, to tell the truth.
However, try for a moment to put on the back burner any obvious distinction between the two sad scenarios and let's focus on the essentials.
In my small way, sheltered by this little page, on both fronts I observe the same destroyed cities, from houses to schools, from hospitals to roads, from cars to every building hit without a sensible, reasonable, acceptable reason.
In any case, I see the existence of thousands of our fellow humans severed without mercy and the pain of those who remain, forced to put back together the pieces of a family, of a feeling, of a love or even just a friendship that will never return as before.
North, as south of the Black Sea, be it the Ukraine or Turkey and Syria I watch and shudder at the thought of the anguish of those who have survived to be condemned in these moments to live with the terror that hell could fall on their heads again any second.
On the other hand, as I was able to write previously, as far as war is concerned, it is not the first and much less the only one to reap victims right now. And the same can be said of an earthquake.
However, imagining the extremely similar consequences of both ideally juxtaposed in the same framework, I cannot help but feel anger and disgust in the face of the only difference that should interest us: the thought that one of the two is our work and equally ours is the chance to stop it…