Well done Mrs Veronica! An open round of applause! The «ad hoc» comparison with Carosello and fast-food is ingenious. However, I wouldn’t point the finger at “young people” since in this column we have read about romantic guys and mature people who have their foot (…let’s say so) in two different beds. Immanuel Kant spoke to us about the “moral law within oneself” (in addition to the starry sky above us!). I believe that the problem is precisely having lost sight of that “moral law” kept within each of us and which has led to certain transgressions. You, very kind Doctor Braghieri, sadly fear that we cannot “push the world into reverse”. I think that we necessarily have to do it! Or at least slow down to avoid crashing. The sky above us is hidden by threatening clouds, the same goes for the morality within us hidden by a fake freedom to listen to our impulses! With all due respect to Immanuel!
Vincent
Dear Vincenzo, I agree with you on the enthusiasm reserved for Mrs. Veronica for the choice of comparisons between the rapid era the Carosello and fast-food. As for the rest, I respond to the part of the letter that concerns me. My skepticism about being able to force the world to go backwards is due to the fact that I now consider myself part of society’s irrelevant generation. For a few years now I have been falling into the hateful category of “young Holden’s adults” (I’m from 1973), except that today adults no longer have the “weight” they had at the time of JDSalinger’s novel nor at those , without going too far back, about my parents. We are a generation (but then, do I have a generation?!) that is unhappy both “backwards” and “forwards”. Children of separated parents without experience of separation and of a golden era that slapped us in the face with its backlash, making us taste well-being and leaving us in the lurch in the midst of a crisis.
A generation awkwardly placed on the half shell of a technological progress that it does not know how to fully exploit and in fact tames with difficulty, the first to have children a second before menopause and andropause, and I could, as you imagine, go on in lines and lines and lines. This is to say that “the kids of now” are our children, those of my generation or so. And already being able to find a common language is a touching success, imagine recording.