San Marino. “The demarcation line” by Rosanna Ridolfi
We receive and publish an intervention entitled “The demarcation line” by Rosanna Ridolfi
Simplifications and complexity
I grew up in the second half of the last century, in an era of clear-cut dualisms (right and left, men and women, capitalism and communism…), when everything was clear and there were certainties in every area.
Or so it seemed.
There familymonogamous, consisting of a man and a woman, a father and a mother, was considered the hub of society.
I children they were born from a maternal womb, it must have horrified then the locutions come surrogate mother or uterus for rent.
Who had sexual desires and tastes different live in the shadows, taking care not to let one’s way of being leak out.
i am muslim, simply inhabitants of countries far from ours, they were not yet considered enemies of humanity. Their religious customs, the veil, the burqa, had a vague exotic charm, just like the song of the muezzin, the mosques, the minarets. Those who were traveling in those territories could observe everything flaunting tolerance and breadth of views, and then return, with a sigh of relief, to their own countries. free and all their habits westerners.
A line that crosses Europe from Szczecin to Triesteand for which the metaphor of Iron Curtain to indicate its invincibility, it marked the territorial boundary above all but ideological that divided the world western from that Orientalthe countries of the liberal democracies from those socialists.
Politically I terms right and left they defined different and well-defined ways of thinking and living.
Now…
The threat of a possible nuclear war which in the last century kept us in suspense and that once the plants were dismantled it was thought to be a closed chapter, returns more insistent, absurd and distressing than ever, but passes like any news on the news or between a commercial and the another of the talk shows: addicted to a bombardment of information as pounding as it is useless, have we become impervious to everything, even the idea of the end of the world?
And with regard to the real war that is being fought in Ukraine with cities of victims, if on the one hand it is affirmed and in any case on the side of those who were attacked, on the other the doubt arises that the causes that triggered the conflict are not attributable to the aggressor alone.
And the contemporary right and left? What are they, what do they mean?
“historical”, And also in other institutional locations, where by the way it seems to have been stations for years. But is it really by deleting the photos, the architectural testimonies, that history is normalized? Or don’t you end up denying it? Perhaps better to leave the portrait of Mussolini where he is, explaining rather, especially to young people, who and what he was.
And it would not be appropriate for the parties, instead of engaging in sterile façade polemics, to dedicate more space to matters relating to the respective company project?
I do not pretend to start conducting a political analysis, I only allow myself some considerations from an ordinary person.
For example: women’s emancipation and the integration of immigrants have always been the banner of the left, but in fact in Italy the first female premier, second in charge of the state, is now on the right, and the first black senator, a Nigerian of origin, he was already elected in 2018, in the League’s line-up. And if, as it seems, the workers of Mirafiori in the last elections voted for Meloni, and in the recently constituted government the president of the Senate was elected also thanks to votes that are not really right-wing, it does not seem to be very clear anymore what the ambit is. of ideas and behaviors that outline the two sides.
In the contemporary scenario, in the meantime, many other things have changed: today it is the condition of immigrants rather than that of the working class that divides the parties; but this is also a complex problem: if it is humanly right that people fleeing war and misery should find help and welcome, it is equally right to close their eyes (as the European Community actually is) on the torture that these poor people suffer in the collection centers in Libya, on the filthy, and deadly, trade in human beings carried out by smugglers? And what about the 2017 Memorandum which is effectively funding Libyan crimes? But above all why pretend not to know that the solution exists and is there for all to see, or to put an end to the exploitation of the African continent (perpetrated for centuries, by all means, by the nations “Western”) favoring its development instead, and far away so that people are no longer forced to leave their land to escape wars and famines? Because it is very likely, even if no one ever dwells on this aspect, that most Africans would prefer not to leave at all.
And in any case, no one, to whatever party they belong, should forget that migrants are not political cards to play to win elections or obtain consensus, but human beings and, often, lives that end up being swallowed up by the Mediterranean.
Then comes the problem of integration. Not long ago, the episode of the thirty-year-old Italian who attacked a pregnant woman, entirely covered by the niqab, in a station in the province of Florence, who, holding her 11-year-old son by the hand, was trying to get on the train. Man’s gesture is inadmissible and racist; But isn’t it also true that by accepting certain customs and practices in the name of an alleged cultural relativism, we would forget the role of victim of these women? A role to which Muslims themselves, as shown by what is happening in Iran, are now rebelling, even at the cost of risking their lives.
Promoting the inclusion of immigrants in our society does not mean tolerating the persistence of misogynistic habits, a symbol of oppression and mutilation.
There is also the question of civil rights, specifically those referable to the sexual orientation of individuals. Many, more and more often, lament with annoyance the intrusive presence of homosexual communities and their problems in today’s society, claiming more attention to the rights of individuals and families “normal“.
Then at the Venice Biennale happens to see a harrowing film like The lord of the ants. The story of Aldo Braibanti, poet, playwright, teacher, former partisan, sentenced in 1968 to nine years in prison for plagiarism in the case of one of his young students, actually of age and consenting (as he himself testified at the trial), who had no better fate: the family had him locked up in a psychiatric hospital where he should have had to face “cure his deviance “ and from which it comes out of forty electric shocks. It all boils down then, especially in consideration of the fact that still today there are those who talk about “deviance“. We realize that it is important to try to understand the suffering of those who are discriminated against for their identity; because the fluidity that is so much talked about probably continues to concern the world of entertainment much more than the real life of people …
How many contradictions, how many questions. Where did the dividing line go? all that remains is to accept the idea that there is almost never an ideal reference model to contrast with an absolutely negative one and that reality, today more than ever, is complex and multifaceted, and only by training ourselves to analyze the multiplicity of the existing from multiple angles , we can hope to understand.
The semantic capital of non-affectivity
Sometimes I pause to observe the inconsistency of what we define as the semantic capital of our time. And I’m not just referring to the one produced on the web, emotional, synthetic, sometimes ungrammatical.
I was shaken long ago by a lawyer reporting excuses of the individual who patronized, to the family of the disabled immigrant whom the latter had barbarously killed, under the eyes of indifferent and unhuman people, who instead of bothering to offer or ask for help, filmed the incident with their cell phones.
And I reflect on the current journalistic language, which to banal stereotypes that we often hear repeated, the question added Do you forgive? to the families of the victims whom some criminals have just deprived of their lives.
You can ask excuse me to a person for accidentally bumping into her or to someone verbally offended in a moment of anger. But you can’t, really no, apologize for killing another helpless human being with his bare hands, deliberately and with unheard of cruelty and sadism: there are quite other feelings that should be externalized (or silenced …). And is it possible to think that a father, a mother, a brother whose loved one has been killed can work on the spot given the concept of forgiveness?
The use of language is increasingly inadequatethe conceptual schemes, the interpretative capacity have blown up, and this is reflected in a verbal expression that has become unable to convey ideas, true emotions, meaning.
Eventually the wrong words, in the wrong context, end up erasing all dividing lines and making everything, even pain, joy, life itself, meaningless.
Play to live
But we don’t have to worry. If we don’t like how we live and don’t feel comfortable in the world we, now we can create an alternative and tailor-made life, in a new ideal space, the Metaverse.
this “word fruit salad“, The result of the creed fusion of a prefix of Greek origin with an English term, literally means, as everyone knows by now,”beyond the universe“. The term, first used in a 1992 cyberpunk novel, Snow fall, that anticipates our time with disturbing foresight.
To be able to move into this new dimension we need to create a alter egoa avatar, (word borrowed, this time, from the Hindu religion) thanks to which we too will become divinity with amazing powers.
Arming ourselves with special gloves and visors that completely isolate us from the everyday life that characterizes us and immerse ourselves in fantastic worlds where we can escape boredom, disorientation, a sense of helplessness; live extraordinary adventures and without limits.
In fact, it’s not all that hypothetical anymore: already now, the Metaverse offers the possibility of Act in an infinity of interconnected virtual worlds, carrying out together with the others “inhabitants“Many activities, such as buying land and properties, making investments in cryptocurrencies, opening virtual companies. Thanks to new frontier of progressthey also offer us, experts say intercultural communicationnew professional opportunities.
All while we remain safe in our room, sitting in front of a screen, with tablet and mobile phone at hand, basking in the illusion of being the architects of our new electronic existence, all masters of all the tools and of this extraordinary “augmented reality“…
… Or risking, in truth, to lose the awareness that it is only a mirror world, an existence, which in fact will make us more artificial than ever, alone and far from real life and history?
But in this case we can define the dividing line between our intellectual and individual freedom and the domination of technology, whether it is by real beings or by occult entities.
Because if we are not given full control of reality, the possibility of refusing to become totally heterodirected beings, I believe, is still in our possession, as well as the faculty, as Susanna Tamaro would say, to to become human.