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The children and the Queen

Stories and News No. 1275

Imagine what is happening in the UK, which is not so far from what is happening in our country, like one of those science fiction stories of the last century, which anticipated the craziness of the future to make us reflect on the current ones.
Is there a line, okay? A long queue of kids, all under the age of fourteen, according to the real story. Like their peers in the rest of the world, they are constantly on the way to a tomorrow they ignore, or who desperately want to be better than yesterday and certainly not worse than today. Under those looks, some angry, others frightened and still others absent – which is the worst thing, they have the same superhuman dreams and the identical, impossible aspirations of any child born with an undervalued dose of luck in his pocket. That's right, I say it from experience. Most of the time it just takes a lot longer for the tenderness that remains to come out and be admired.
At the end of the line, to direct those kids towards the ladder of a gigantic plane that looks like an evil dragon ready to swallow them in its belly, there is a robot.
A machine, you understand? A mechanism without a soul or not even the illusion of having it; a creature who is not such, devoid of feelings and empathy; an object animated only by a set of zeros and ones, for which “humanity” is just a word, a heap of data, a succession of figures to be weighed and organized, following the tasks suggested by the program. Well, I think it is useless to remember that behind the latter, sooner or later, you will find a person in flesh and blood, because time flies and devours our lives, as well as that monster that looks like an airplane.
Meanwhile, in the evoked scene, the kids, I repeat, the kids are identified and sent to the ravenous monster, about to rise up into hell.
Am I exaggerating? And how you call Rwanda when you are not even fourteen and they take you there alone, thousands of miles from the place where you were born and escaped to survive death?
At this point, let's say that some of us – I hope many, get up from the armchair or sofa in disbelief: how? Minors? Not even fourteen? They are little more than children... it’s absurd, it’s wrong, it’s atrocious…
Yes it is.
Nevertheless the scene goes on undaunted, because now only a fragile screen is what separates us from such insane events. And even if we were able to make our voice heard by the assistant, it would be useless, right? I said it at the beginning of the fairy tale: the frustrating note is that the one who condemns children to this sad fate is a robot, who is unable to understand our human needs.
Well, the most unacceptable and monstrously criminal fact is that in the real world, at this very moment, that is exactly what the British government is doing, treating like an adult anyone who has landed on the shores of the celebrated Queen without the alleged right to kneel in front of her and enjoy her benevolence...

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