Stories and News No. 1248
We shouldn't have learned to read your language. Or, perhaps, you shouldn't have had to cross long stretches of sea and strategic straits, deluding ourselves that you came to bring gold, frankincense and myrrh, instead of weapons and above all infections. It hurts to know that besides the delirium that divides us, you others had the elixir of survival rather than a long life. That hunger and thirst were treatable undoubtedly surprised us long ago. But it is also the law of nature that helps us to understand that the earth’s fruits have a time and it is a sentence inscribed in the folds of the human horizon that sooner or later we will slaughter each other for the last apple or the last, blessed water sip. But we would have expected everything except discovering that what is incurable on one side of the planet is curable on the other. Almost six million people of all ages, mostly women and children, are killed by unbeatable enemies every year, or at least that's what we thought. They shouldn't have connected us to the network. We call them disasters, tragedies, terrible misfortunes, while you others simply call them infectious diseases or even age-related ailments, such as measles. And now we also learn that a report by the Access to Medicine Foundation, a non-profit organization based in Amsterdam, reveals that only 54 of the 166 drugs and vaccines analyzed, which would save lives by the millions, are granted to us. We shouldn't have learned to count. Even with regard to the most basic operations, such as 166 minus 54. 112. 112 medicines. 112 bottles, flasks, boxes. 112 inscriptions on the package, with the instructions on the back, the warnings in the leaflet, the number of pills to swallow, or dissolve, before and after meals. Yes, meals, another obvious word, especially in the plural. But on this side of the mirror, where together with all the real versions of Alice we would run back home, the list was different. Here we dreamed of one hundred and twelve magical potions, let out a hundred and twelve unheard cries and exhaled twelve plus a hundred last breaths before closing the story, most of the time bitterly in advance. Maybe, and I mean it grudgingly, with clenched teeth and lips almost glued together, we shouldn't have survived. Because it is really difficult to accept that what you justified as inescapable, adverse fate could have been defeated at the hands of humans, earthly, mortal like you. What was the use of praying to every deity in heaven? Was it possible that it would have been enough to follow your steps backwards, to the colonialist headquarters, to defeat death? And then some of you still wonder today why so many try, despite all the risks up to the landing and even beyond. Indeed, above all beyond. Hence, I ask myself: is it just a personal matter? That is, are we talking about good old racism? Or, maybe, even among your pairs you get on the plane of life and when the time comes to jump, because it always comes, know it, you hide the parachute from those who don't have the money to pay for it? Well, remember this too: this absurd cruelty only works as long as the ballast passengers are down in their seats with their necks between their legs. You shouldn't have gotten sick in so many too. Because we heard you cry and moan like us and we raised our heads. And now we know that even injustice. It is treatable.
My last book: A morte i razzisti (Death to racists)