Stories and News No. 1300
Like many others, I focused on the government's failure to cut fuel taxes. Some have underlined Meloni's inconsistency between promises and effective punctuality in keeping them. And despite her justifications, it doesn’t matter if she has made her propaganda shots more or less recently, because consistency does not have an expiration date. It applies after, but also before, otherwise words weigh little or nothing and it isn't like that. It shouldn't be so if the lives of individuals as well as entire populations are at risk.
In this regard, therefore, more than coherence, I am more concerned with words. The Italian prime minister, in her usual controversial video on the aforementioned fuel taxation, used an expression that gave me much to think about and which I consider emblematic of modern society: "Now we are dealing with reality."
Meloni - like many of her peers here in Italy and in a large part of the western world - is realizing that she has to do that once inside a government, where doing is required much more than saying. Because the electoral campaign has long since ended and if you really want to let your brain breathe you have to answer specific questions that actually correspond to enormous problems, some historical ones, and you can't get away with a slogan or even a lie.
However, at the same time, out there, beyond the confines of a promotional video on social media, billions of people make such accounts with reality every single second of their lives starting from the very first.
Listing without a precise order, based only on the news of recent days, I will give just two examples, different and in a certain sense distant, yet similar for many reasons. The first concerns a 22-year-old man who died this morning crushed by a pallet. I wondered what it is, I searched the web and among other things, having been a porter as a boy, I remembered using them. There must have been a very heavy load on it, poor guy. Nonetheless, in the political narrative, they translate it into yet another "death at work", an expression that now seems to be something as normal as it is inevitable, such as "deaths from bad weather" or the "shipwreck of migrants" at sea.
The second example, regarding the latter, can be seen by focusing on Africa, while Meloni and her goliardic colleagues enjoy sending the NGO ships full of unfortunate people as far away as possible as long as their opponents take care of it, as if holding the fate of human lives in your hands were some kind of fun parlor game. Yet, just today a United Nations report tells us that on that same continent, particularly in the sub-Saharan area, children are 15 times more likely to die in infancy than their peers in Europe and North America, while woman's risk of having a stillborn child is seven times more. In general, we read that in 2021 at least five million children died before reaching the fifth year, most of whom saw the light, or only imagined it, in South Asia and, as mentioned, in Africa.
I don't know how many of the current rulers of the world can understand the following rhetorical question, in my humble opinion of a disconcerting banality: considering such terrible accounts with reality, how stubborn to have a better future do you think they are those who have the strength and the fortune to overcome that fifth year of life?
Before sending someone to government, or going there personally, we should all start from reality, but not ours, perhaps conditioned by the advantages of the case. The priority term of comparison, as a mother often does with her children, must be the one who is in the worst conditions and from there to rise to the top.
Because since the beginning of the world you always start counting from the smallest number.