Stories and News No. 1312
I like to think, imagine or even dream, that in those dark days one person among many, perhaps at a young age and with a courageous faith in the future, placed her or his hopes in the following letter. I don't know, putting it in the classic bottle before throwing it into the sea, or closing it underground in a box, with the obligation for posterity to reopen it in the light of a different and much better tomorrow.
In other words, finally free from the past.
Dear you,
Who lives over there, beyond the limits of a calendar that I will barely touch, where I would like to be and live even just for one day.
How beautiful is to be born and grow up in your shoes, am I right? And how lucky you people are, having stopped living in fear. The fear of saying what you plan to do, even before doing, and of saying or even thinking, even before doing or saying.
You are no longer afraid, right? And you will certainly have defeated that hateful form of self-censorship of own emotions, as well as ideas, which imprisons you more than the chains of the strongest metal in the world.
What a great life to be able to give breath in every moment and place to the most intimate thought or inspiration of the heart without fear of being lynched for this in the public square, more or less metaphorically.
What am I saying? For you, freedom is no longer a myth to be dreamed up in the midst of an optimistic figure of speech. You are free, because you were born free. And you were born free because some of us weren't and gave everything away for everything we didn't have.
Only in this way you the world be changed once and for all: fighting to the death until every fragment of the original idea is added, as we do with puzzles. Because if you decide to leave out and neglect that missing piece, day after day, year after year, it expands like a harmless speck of mold on the ceiling. And everything starts again and goes back to how it is now.
I ask your forgiveness, but how I envy you who live in a country that has freed itself from what at this moment limits our very existence and obscures every horizon that we can imagine possible. Among many, the idea that a community of people can entrust every expectation about the present, as well as about tomorrow, to a single person, however popular, charismatic and photogenic; the conviction that a healthy and citizen-oriented government is one that takes hasty and simplifying decisions on every topic and that considers the confrontation between different and even discordant opinions on the latter as a useless ballast; and the theory according to which the strength of a nation is measured in the power of its army and the weapons which it is equipped with.
I guess it wasn't easy to get through all of that and everything else. Read as well as the horrors of my time, as well as the mistakes, for which to make amends with the dead and survivors, and their descendants.
I could trivially refer to the racial laws, but you, enlightened people, will know better than me – this is what I hope more than anything else, that when hell becomes the norm, after having treated it as if it were a disease, it is necessary to do to the same with the virus that generated it. Otherwise, it will find other forms and names to infect the world.
I could also mention with no less obvious words the colonial crimes, the violence, the massacres, the robbery of geographies and living stories, but I certainly count on the fact that you will have understood that when you bring death and suffering beyond the borders of other people's lives, you will receive as a dowry an obligation to repair the wrongs inflicted on the victims which does not expire until there is peace and serenity for both. Otherwise, you will see that they will come to you incessantly to show you the bill.
I apologize, but I can not go further. At the thought of putting myself in your shoes, to live in a land so free from what for us today is a nightmare called reality, I feel myself bursting with joy like the only bomb that would have reason to exist.
Before saying goodbye, I leave you with a prayer. If you read this of mine and you are who I believe, thank you for finally accomplishing what we fought for.
Otherwise, please return the letter where you found it.
And keep fighting…