Human beings are truly a separate category: complexes, contradictory, often indecipherable.
I don’t want to fall into the trap of generalization – fortunately there are still straight, sensitive people, capable of authentic empathy. But, let’s face it honestly, there are no few negative exceptions that throw deep shadows on our collective ability to express goodness and commit ourselves for mutual respect.
It happens more and more often to cross a neighbor on the landing and not even get a hint, a look, a simple greeting. Invisible to each other, as tired gears of a daily life that has lost the sense of the most elementary human bond.
It then happens that someone, with a disturbing ease, chooses not to deal with their parents or elderly family members, relegating them to structures that seem more centers of abandonment than places of care. Sometimes, it does so not for real necessity, but to get rid of the weight of emotional responsibility, as if love could be delegated.
But even in the most ordinary gestures a form of cynicism lurks: files skipped at the supermarket (but that would be the minimum), in the hospital, in public offices. There are those who insinuate themselves in front with the air of those who “know someone”, surviving everyone with a complicit smile or a bold attitude. And while you expect hours to assist a sick relative or receive indispensable care, they advance as if the time and suffering of others were worth less.
Or, more simply, it is enough to set foot outside the home to realize that those words of “humanity” remain a dead letter, only fiction. In concrete contexts – at work, in human relationships, in public life – many of these “paladins of good and justice” become cold, indifferent, sometimes even ruthless. They advance like tanks along their way, regardless of those in front of them, too taken from their journey to stop and look at those who are overwhelming. Indifferent to listening and unable to dedicate half a minute of their time to the other.
In everyday life, what is increasingly missing is humanity. Kindness, respect, compassion are values that seem to have dissolved. Nobody really listens to, nobody observes carefully and as they are facing. We are islands closed in an archipelago that has lost its connections.
Yet – and this is the most bitter paradox – the same people who in reality show arid and distracted, are transformed into the virtual world. They publish posts full of empathy, repeated, powerful, full of moral meanings in the direction of the peoples battered by the wars, expressing solidarity for Israelis, Palestinians, Iranians, Ukrainians, Russians, for the peoples of Burkina Faso, of Papua Nuova Guinea, and anyone else is the victim of distant injustices. They speak of peace, brotherhood, universal love, solidarity … in fact, solidarity. Preachers of a new humanity, as beautiful as it is false because, not infrequently, those who flaunt such a resolute and combative posture, then, in the private individual, often show themselves inclined to cunning and indifference towards any civil law and principle of humanity, as well as good education.
Why do we fight with the knife between the teeth to defend the reasons of those who live thousands of kilometers away or at the other head of the world – a battle that, are clear, I consider sacrosanct, legitimate and I do not consider useless – and at the same time we have built such a shaded, individualistic and selfish society that it is indifferent to the neighbor who is only one centimeter from our nose?
And then he wonders: where does hypocrisy ends and where true humanity begins? Perhaps this keyboard empathy is only a comfortable mask, a way to feel good without really having to change anything. An illusion of clean consciousness that fulfills us?