Stories and News No. 1261
Once upon a time a simple story that is like a fairy tale from older times, which probably dates back to the beginning of the latter.
Even a child would understand it. Indeed, maybe he would grasp the meaning better than anyone else, older and wiser, more adult and proud of their higher education.
Yet each of us, since the day when the first of humans saw the world’s light, listened to, observed and lived it with the same words, the identical chords and the same images. Or drawings, which in a fairy tale never hurt, quite the opposite.
The plot is incredibly elementary: first there is peace, then war comes and in the end – hopefully, for the relief of readers from all places and times, we return to the beginning. Peace again, hurrah, because this is what we all hope for, those who read and write, and even those who attack and those who defend themselves and counterattacks, even if inside the idiocy of the fight we sometimes forget it.
But then, if this story is so ancient, why in every period of time do we seem have not yet understood its moral?
Why do we need so much to listen to, observe and experience it again?
Again and again, and again again?
I don't have the right answer. If I had it, I would do anything, even risking my life for those I care about in this world, so that it becomes universal. And if I had superpowers or knew the art of magic, like the heroes of today's cinema, I would engrave it in colossal characters on the celestial vault with star ink, so that every night, before falling asleep, the entire human race threw an eye on it so as not to forget it the following day.
Nonetheless, with all the humility in the world, my gray hair pushes me to offer some suggestions.
Maybe I am wrong, it is sure that it is so, or it is very likely that I am not the first to do that, but over time I have convinced myself that we have not fully understood two fundamental things about war and peace: how many victims of the former are actually and what are the weapons to win the latter.
Weapons, yes, because peace must be fought and won just as it is often said for war, which on the other hand, in fact, nobody ever wins for real and we all lose.
The victims of war, of all wars, are trivially those who lose their lives and consequently their families, deprived in such a violent and obtuse way of their loved ones; they are also the people who find themselves without a home, school, a job, an entire recognizable world and with rubble and destruction everywhere in place of the latter; it is the peoples who, because of these uniquely human abominations, are forced to move as far away as possible from the country which they were born and raised in, that in a short time turns into a real hell on earth.
However, the mistake that many of us make from generation to generation is to believe that the list stops there.
So try to consider the particular contingency that see us again relatively close to the noise of bombs that kill horizons and erase present and future from living maps. So focus on every child and reflect for a moment on their state of mind after two years of pandemic in which they had the misfortune to face such a shocking event worldwide in a period so fragile of their existence. And just when they finally began to see a light, perhaps this time definitive, at the end of the tunnel darkened and made asphyxiating by our delusional scuffles between vaccines, tampons and Green Pass, Vax against No Vax, they find themselves hearing about war at the gates, as well as even the risk of a nuclear conflict.
If you ever feel that you have further space in your imagination, or even better in your heart, remove the boundaries from it and multiply this nightmare for children all over the world, who experience war firsthand, or listen to and observe its history more or less distantly.
Billions of innocent victims in the most literal possible way, then, while none of the others – I am talking about my adult generation, should feel young enough not to blame. Because when the day comes when the fire rains from the sky and the sirens of the shelters sing their terrifying song, it means that we have all made mistakes except them.
It means that we have not really fought and won the peace, the only battle that is worth living and that requires a constancy which does not provide for any armistice.
Maybe we didn't have the courage to the end, because it takes a lot to take the field every day with the intention of building real harmony between us. Or, perhaps, because no one taught us when we were children what the weapons to face it are.
They are called hospitality and solidarity.
They are called meeting with the other, especially if they are people infinitely different and distant from us.
More than anything else, they are called careful listening, silent observation and shared life of the stories of war and peace of the past and present.
But with eyes, ears and all the imagination that survived the child we were.
Perhaps at this moment it could be useful to ask for help and advice from our children and grandchildren...