Italian
It is a saying used to casually link two factors that have no relation to each other. This operation is well known to politicians, who apply it daily to attack or defend their positions, channeling dissent or support at will.
Yet, doing politics is a difficult art that requires exceptional qualities. It is an art that, when successful, is rewarded, but remains a risky, precarious profession, limited in time and space. Above all, it requires enormous personal sacrifices.
Visibility, a distorting and indispensable mirror, forces one to renounce privacy. The politician has no right to shadows, nor to a private life: there is no family or vacation that holds, and they are criticized for their ideas as well as their most intimate aspects.
In this irreverent game, the audience stands as a defender of unwavering ethical principles. The politician is asked for absolute honesty and sacrifice for the common good; a demand that the average citizen does not place on themselves, as they are free to pursue their own interests even at the expense of the community, or to ignore ethical standards in order to enjoy their own freedom.
There is, however, a free zone that unites the leader and the ordinary individual: neither is obliged to tell the truth. The politician to defend his position; the citizen to defend himself.
The serious incident that occurred in Modena is the tragic demonstration of how the immediate emotional aspects of ordinary people are not balanced by the proper distance that those in politics should maintain.
On one side, innocents strolling unaware on a peaceful holiday afternoon in the city center; on the other, a thirty-year-old man, described as sick and confused, but whose actions reveal a burden of hatred and anger. An anger born from a normality he wishes to achieve but cannot realize.
“Others are happy, I am not. I am condemned to marginality and rejection.”
It is the drama of perceived failure despite the sacrifices made to obtain a degree, the head-on clash with a society that struggles to accept diversity.
In front of this scenario, the political reaction was immediate and predictable. There was immediate talk of madness, of schizophrenia, and the most severe penalties were called for. The parties quickly seized the tragedy to fuel their own positions: on one side, those who blame a sought-after integration “at any cost,” and on the other, those who call for increasingly stringent and exclusionary filters.
But to understand what happened, it is not enough to hide behind the convenient wall of madness. Even in the most inexplicable madness, there is a basis of comprehensibility.
This drama brings to mind the case of that former army officer who, from his home window, began shooting at passersby, spreading panic and death. It is the rage that explodes when one finds oneself powerless in the face of indifference and intolerance.
When any action taken collides with a denial, against a justification for the refusal that, if constant and seemingly legitimate, drains the individual of any self-control strategy and hope, the tension rises to the breaking point.
As long as there is a way out, the human being resists. When all the doors are barred, there is nothing left but to stop and wait. But if deep despair sets in, the only remaining escape route is violently broken.
At that point, the questions remain suspended in the void. Who will compensate the victims and their loved ones for the pain endured? It certainly won’t be a judgment according to the law that will restore the meaning.
And who — and how — will make the author of such a disaster understand that there could have been other responses to his failures?
This is exactly where politics should change pace. Instead of riding the emotional wave, it should help citizens reflect on common responsibilities. Because responsibility always remains collective, both for better and for worse.
No government can ever explain whether it will rain today or be nice tomorrow, and this is not what is expected from intelligent politics.
We do not need politicians to succumb to the fatalism of the reckless act, nor to use it as a thermometer to exacerbate conflicting opinions that are destined to never find a synthesis.
From a politician, one does not expect the forcing of the antithesis. One expects a reasoned synthesis. The only one capable of reconstructing, from the brutality of the news, that sense of community and balance that violence has tragically interrupted.
