We’re starting from the principle that the Italian is a frustrated person. He is fighting for survival in every moment of the day. He accumulates, suffers, swallows, all in silence. He doesn’t understand (or he understands too well) and he adapts for reasons of “force majeure” to a stepmother society. The children’s school, the mortgage, the job. He’s got few goals left and like a dazed horse, he trots after the carrots of the pension, the TFR {final lump sum payment}, the health service, a job whatever it is. For a long time he has been a “separato in casa” {separated but living in the same house} with democracy. Instead of him, the ones making decisions are the parties, the markets, the stock exchanges with which he has no relationship. Swap, derivative, hedge fund, spread, bund, and CDS are words of a new vocabulary. An incomprehensible neo-language that is frightening, a language of finance aliens who have come to destroy his world. It’s a straw dog that could catch fire at any moment. With his archaic animal instinct, the Italian senses the arrival of a tempest in which he will lose those few certainties that used to help him to bite the bullet. Without a pension, without a house, without a job. Even a field mouse if forced into a corner without an escape route, rises up and bites.
The dormant volcano is about to come back to life and that’s inevitable. What type of volcano will it be? Where will its lava flows go? Over the financial system? Over the parties? Over anything it meets? We need to ask these questions now, before exasperation becomes normal and we need to involve the citizens in the decisions, to give examples. Hoping that public order can be maintained with the security forces is utopian. The volcano is being fed continually from the lack of participation of the Italians in every decision relating to them. The referenda are ignored. Public financing to the parties and nuclear (the first time) thrown out by the will of the people, have been brought back, and now they are starting to discuss the privatisation of water. We are waiting for the oracular response from a gentleman that has a banker as his straight man and who will tell us on 5 December what sacrifices to make. It’s like the New Year Lottery but upside down. What have we got to do with all this? Did anyone consult us while the government was burning our future and getting the nation into debt? Has someone explained to us why we were outside the crisis in June and now we are in pre-default? And why are these incapable people still seated in parliament and so richly paid? And why will the parliamentary annuities only be abolished from the next legislature and not from this one? And why does the citizen never count at all? The volcano is erupting, erupting …