Yesterday I was walking along the beach among the people. Some recognised me and asked me a question that is the same as ever: “What will happen to Italy? How will we come through? What’s to be done?” Sometimes a dialogue got started, a conversation and slowly but surely other people started to listen. It seemed like being on a soap box at Hyde Park corner in London, where anyone can stand up on a box and spout at the passers-by. I was in the sand dunes rather than in a public park. The diagnosis of Italy’s ills was almost always the one shared: the occupation of the State by the parties, the decline of education, of research, the deindustrialisation, the loss of moral values, the ramshackle organisation we are living in slowly running aground on a sandbank of indifference. A few shouted out: "Forza Grillo!", "Sei l'unica speranza rimasta, Grillo!" {Go for it Grillo! “You are the only hope left, Grillo!”} The more I listened to them the more I got worried. I had the uncomfortable sensation of an “Armiamoci e parti” {Let’s get armed and you go!} (me on my own)” And I started to ask them how they would have changed things. The responses were always in the conditional: “I would do, I would say, I would plan ….” When I asked why it was not “You are doing, you are saying, you are planning now” and a passage to the present indicative, the faces changed their expression, the eyes becoming more hazy and what emerged was a slight irritation, as though to tell me off for having committed a discourtesy. The wife of a hospital doctor explained that her husband cannot put himself against the system. They would destroy him. A state employee said the same thing, as did a sales assistant in a big shop and a local police officer. They don’t want to run the risk of losing the little (or the lot) that they have. And this nails them to the wall like a pin and a butterfly. I understand them. But as long as the majority of the Italians think like that, there will not be radical change. Individual responsibility stops in front of one’s own well-being. But without individual responsibility, without the courage to make a denunciation, to stand up to be counted, there is not a plan for society. The Italians hear the noise of the rushing water, they know they are in a boat full of holes, but until they fall down the rapids, many will stay there watching.
Leo Longanesi said that the Italians run to help the winner, but with what we can expect, social and economic default, there will be no winners, only losers. Who will we rush to help?
A prisoner inside this thought, I looked at the sea, towards Corsica, and I don’t know why, I thought of Newton, who has nothing to do with Italy’s future: "to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me". Our future is still all to be written.
They will never give up (but is it in their interests?). Neither will we.