Stories and News No. 1254
Once upon a time the reverse habit. Some will talk about in the future, which is now called present, but like all its predecessors, it too was born in the past.
I refer to the typically human ease of getting used to the inconsistencies of living from one second to another, in spite of what we fought and suffered until death as a species, people, nation, city or community, you choose how many of your fellow human beings you feel to belong to this moment of your life.
In this regard, I think that the parenthesis opened by the pandemic – the closed version I hope will be drawn as soon as possible on the pages of our common history, did not suddenly project us onto another planet or into a different dimension. The former humanity is more or less always the same and the Covid phase is similar to any stretch of path more difficult than usual, which puts you particularly to the test, so that those who give their best in such occasions, are useful to themselves and the others, while on the contrary... and so on.
The difference is that billions have entered this tunnel, even if many of us have done nothing but add it to all the previous ones, which are by no means closed in parentheses. These people have always lived in a tunnel because they were born there, and at the end of theirs there has never been light or maybe someone have suffocated it with garbage.
Anyway, I was talking about the opposite habit, which these days seems to have acquired a literal connotation that is surprising to say the least.
I start with the most trivial detail, which sees us relieved if the result of the swab is negative, despite the positive, even if the popular perception is usually the opposite in every other area.
In fact, this time in the commonly accepted meaning, every modality of relationship between us is considered positive while has very little comforting, healthy, in a word human.
At a distance it is preferable to in proximity or, in the expression currently in vogue, in presence.
Making a group, being together, so many to become one, whether it is a crowd or not, mean violation, risk, danger.
While isolation, solitude, walls everywhere all around, albeit in a clean and suitably ventilated environment, mean health and safety.
Touching, kissing and hugging, skin in contact, bodies that annihilate any solution of continuity with the other that does not obsessively correspond to the much overestimated oneself, is again the most damned of taboos, erasing in a flash centuries of painful sacrifices and bloody victories. It’s like when you press a button on your computer and ask yourself: will I really have saved everything that was there before?
Seriously, I'm wondering now: Did we make a copy of the best we had before putting on masks and waving goodbye with fists and elbows as if our hands had been chopped off?
Because the habit in reverse, however wrong and harmful, is a human pathology in that has old origins. It repeats itself over and over every time the current society, that is all of us, ends up getting lazy and adapting to every single contradiction that requires at least the effort to get up from the sofa to pronounce the most underrated of the short words of our reviled vocabulary: no.
In full, a not entirely accidental example, no, everyone but not Berlusconi as President of the Republic...
You know, like many of you I am not able to foresee how it will go and what awaits us in the aftermath of this night that does not seem to end, but for my part I am working hard to save in my memory all the good things I assume I have done, experienced, understood, in general lived alone and together with others, as well as what I have seen done, experienced, understood and experienced by observing the latter.
Because, as has already happened in the past, like what is staged now, and will surely repeat itself in the time called tomorrow, this precious set of memories is the only vaccine that is able to protect us from the worst and most underestimated of viruses.
It is called, coincidentally, the other way around: oblivion and I write it here at the end to keep it in mind better than all the rest.