Dear lad, dear lass of 2009,
I am a lad of the 1960s. My name is Beppe Grillo and I’m 60 years old. I am part of the generation that has screwed you. Your future is without a pension, without TFR {lump sum payment on retirement}, without work. Your present is in the hands of old wizened, dolled up, “pretend youngsters”. When I was a child, the air and the water were clean, traffic was limited, my family didn’t run up debts and I walked home from school on my own. There were no Po valley patrols and not even foreign criminals who were free. Those convicted of mafia crimes didn’t become senators.
The State slaughters hadn’t started, Milan‘s Piazza Fontana was just a place where the trams went by. The companies were managed by entrepreneurs. It is strange to say this now, but there were people who invested their own money to develop the companies. And managers that could see far. ENI’s Enrico Mattei, killed in an attack, Adriano Olivetti, Mondadori, Ferrari, Borghi and a hundred others that I don’t remember. Around the cities there were meadows and not the cement cemeteries called residential units. The milk bottle that I took back to the milkman and they didn’t build incinerators. The television was a public service where real journalist worked, people like Enzo Biagi, and with only fifteen minutes of advertising a day. When people talked they talked using the future tense. The present and the past were complement verbs. The public parks were clean and you could walk along the pavements without having to weave in and out of the parked cars. People were kinder and they would often smile. In Il Corriere della Sera, Montanelli, Buzzati and Pasolini were writing.
Parents knew that their offspring would have a better future. Only from the point of view of money, but they had no means of foreseeing that. Rivers were clean and you could go for a swim at the weekend that wasn’t called “week end” in Italian at that time. The only problem was with the uncatchable horse flies. Beaches were free and the sea was almost always blue-green. The P2 was a squared variable and not yet the anti-State planned by Cefis. Gelli had not recruited the novice Berlusconi with the card number 1816. Italy was a single indivisible entity and Bossi was studying with the “Radio Elettra” correspondence school. Everyone worked hard, but you could save and the pension was a safe haven. It was a little Eden. Now it is lost. We didn’t know we had it. Many people were disparaging about it. In the last 60 years we have had a development without progress. And now we don’t even have development.
The generations that came before you, deserve to be put on trial by you, dear lad, dear lass. They are guilty of having stolen your future. They are living in the present with the second home, the pensions without a contributory basis. They are governing you. Italy has the oldest couple of State office holders President/Prime Minister in the whole world. They use the police against the students and the precarious workers. They have killed democracy and the companies like Tronchetti and Geronzi, the crumbs of success.
Dear lad, dear lass, you can no longer stand and watch. Your life is sliding out of your hands. You, instead of letting it slide away, hold onto it. I am not able to give lessons to anyone. I have made too many mistakes and I am too old (even though I don’t show my age, crikey!). But I have lived in a more beautiful, truer, more colourful, more human, time. And I know that it is possible for you as well.
They will never give up (but is it in their interests?). Neither will we." Beppe Grillo