Stories and News No. 1274
For more than twenty-five years, by now, almost thirty, and closely alongside the artistic one, I have been following another path, accompanying the journey of young people of all ages, whether or not they are still such by birth.
Most of the time – armed by theater, imagination and curiosity, but above all stories personally experienced, I wait for them entering the room where due to more or less striking derailments from the “normal” path. But we could also define it socially tolerated or simply ordered and visible.
Whatever they say, at the end of the day they are just kids like the others, I repeat it to myself every day and they show it to me as well.
In addition to the individual, personal problems which they face on a daily basis, like their peers who have had greater luck with the choices of destiny, they are also forced to meet obstacles that in reality are not random at all, but artfully constructed.
Now I am not a sociologist, in this regard I speak only from experience of life and work in the field, but I have the impression that among the various swords of Damocles that we have imposed on our children there is this annoying semantic fraud of the politically correct, that is of its antagonists. To be current, the enemies of woke.
The thing that has left me most uneasy in the last two years is seeing young people who had repeatedly heartened me about the future, showing an innate openness to diversity and its undoubted richness, being as much as fascinated by this recent trend: you are cool if you seem cynical and not afraid to pronounce all the little words with the N, the L, and all the initials that in the past decades have instead been the object of real and fundamental achievements, much more relevant and urgent than the words themselves.
For a while I have wanted to address this topic, but then I recently read a news that in my humble opinion is particularly emblematic and I thought that that moment had arrived. Perhaps because I needed to have something tangible and real to better clarify what I believe.
On May 28 in the United States, in Tempe, Arizona, Sean Bickings, a 34-year-old man, drowned in the eyes of three police officers. According to the report, they had just stopped him for a discussion with his wife, that was further re-dimensioned by the latter in an official statement.
In a video taken by the cameras of the agents - blessed be the one who invented them - they watch for more than ten minutes at the whole scene, with the man climbing over the structure that overlooks the lake and throws himself into it, and then takes a swim offshore. Then, risking his life, he asks the police for help and despite his cries and the pleas of his partner, the three remain impassive to observe the scene, commenting with phrases that I find gruesome: "How far do you think he will be able to swim?" or "I don't throw myself in the water for you", among others.
Nonetheless, I ask myself and I ask you: am I a hypocrite sine I find them gruesome? Next Monday I will definitely talk about it with the group, but I wanted to somehow think about it thoroughly.
I state that I have no presumption in judging the three in any way, because I am not able to say with certainty that on the contrary I would have dived to help that man. I like to think that this is the case, but it would be too easy to state it only with words, as they say.
However, speaking of words, I took an in-depth tour on the internet to read user comments and I had yet another confirmation of how much is dangerous what is happening these days: most do not condemn the cops at all, but on the contrary praise them. In general, as if they had done the only right thing, watching motionless the live death of a human being.
The moral that emerges from the short, but intense journey I just made among the people of the web, is that the guy is an adult and if he was looking for it, and that only an idiot would have put himself at risk to help a stranger.
Well, I will be wrong, I will only be aged, but no one can get a very simple concept out of my head, which is exactly what I imagine I will share with my group of kids next week: you, that in front of such demonstrations of inhumanity find comfort for the self disintegration - fueled by the multinational of individualism - of what remains of your humanity, you believe it is useful to retaliate against those who sometimes rightly prove to be equally selfish and only more hypocritical.
In other words, cheers! I am not so bad, because out there they are all coldly self-centered like me, even if they are unaware victims of a very studied, international operation to reduce empathy.
Well, to those who see it that way, I only say that this is a very sad victory. Because those with whom you should instead compare yourself are women and men, no matter what clothes or uniforms they have, who take them off every day and throw themselves into the waves to save others without even thinking about it for a second.
Those idiots do exist, they are many more than you think, it's just that they are no longer trendy and are now far from any hype.
They help others with the cameras off and if they come out alive they go home at the end of the day, if that's okay, without a shred of praise.
You see, in conclusion, I think our current problem is that listening to people's lives like this puts us into question, makes us feel small and useless, and urges us to get our asses off the armchairs with which we affirm our claimed freedom to fill the social networks with hatred and lies.
Much better to praise the indifferent, am I right?