Dear Vittorio,
but what is happening to the “perfect family”? If it exists (…and without falling into the usual political stereotypes for and against “God, country and family”!). Let’s skip over the very concept of what family is, in the belief that any circumstance in which we find certainties that are not only emotional is so (even a barracks can be!), but why this frequency of episodes of violence? Like a mirror that suddenly falls (do you remember that character from the film “The Legend of 1900” who describes it?), there are many news stories in which the most unsuspecting ones shatter, killing the dearest people. Unborn children included. Can there be a reason other than the inflated blame on the pandemic?
Mario Taliani
Dear Mario,
as far as I can remember, I don’t think I’ve ever known the “perfect family” you’re talking about, except in cookie and snack ads, where parents and children appear smiling in the early morning, gathered at a table and intent on having breakfast. An iconic image that we now refer to to indicate a type of family unit that is more idealistic than realistic, even fake, given that we all know, from personal and direct experience, that the family can represent a toxic, unhealthy, unsafe, if not downright dangerous and lethal habitat. In fact, in some families, unfortunately many, the worst crimes that a human being can be guilty of are even committed. The mother who kills her two newborns and buries them in the garden, the parents so distracted that they don’t understand that their daughter is pregnant twice in the space of barely two years, the mother who abandons her infant at home, alone, without water, without food, without comfort, causing his death in order to be able to spend a long weekend of love with her boyfriend, the 17-year-old boy who kills his little brother with about seventy stab wounds and then his father and mother to “emancipate himself” and “feel free”, are not simply news stories, but they are our daily bread, every day we read and learn about bloody events that happen beyond those walls that, seen from here, seem “normal” to us but that also contain secrets, dramas, fears, betrayals, loneliness, perversions, resentments, envies, indifference. Explosive mixes of emotions that often lead to murder. Do you think it will happen from today? Or can we perhaps believe that it is because of the pandemic that we have become more violent, evil, intolerant? I refuse to offer such an explanation.
No, these things have always happened. Perhaps today there is a growing loneliness due to the spread of those means of communication that we call “social” but that have nothing “social” about them, considering that they tear sociality away from us, deprive us of it. In fact, everyone is alone, isolated with their cell phone, deluding themselves into participating, sharing, meeting others, but this contact does not happen, it is lost. Perhaps this leads us to feel less empathy towards others and to close ourselves off. In short, we have become less sensitive, less capable of tuning into the emotions of others, of connecting, of communicating.
These factors and phenomena have also affected and affected the family environment and relationships between relatives, there is no doubt about it. Just consider that meals are no longer opportunities to tell each other about the day, to talk. Even at the table, cell phones dominate, which are sometimes given to children so that they stay quiet and good and do not bother adults, adults who are not capable of educating, of setting limits, of saying no, even out of laziness. I do not know if the individual was shattered first and then the family or vice versa. The fact is that it happened. Yesterday’s families were not perfect. But contemporary ones have broken the record, they are even worse. However, we cannot avoid defending this institution, which represents the first cell of society. This organism must be cared for, its value and importance must be rediscovered, the educational role of parents must be restored. The starting point? Paying attention to the other. In short, you cannot have a pregnant daughter at home and not notice that she is pregnant, you cannot be so careless as not to see your child’s discomfort, you cannot be so caught up in yourself as not to realize that that child, or that boy, is torn apart by a deep internal discomfort that could destroy him at any moment, destroying you too. Of course, who could ever imagine that the person you brought into the world, cared for, looked after, protected could kill you? And who could ever imagine that the person who gave you life could decide to take it away from you?
We are all vulnerable, we are all defenseless, we are all potential victims and potential executioners.
It is not the fault of the times. We would like to understand. We would like to give ourselves a rational explanation. We would like to identify those responsible.
But the human being is also this thing here, this monstrous thing. Dark. Inexplicable.