Dear Director Feltri,
I cried in front of the video of the disabled boy thrown into the sea, in Bari, with a very violent kick thrown at him by a young man for pure fun, while the other members of the group, but I should say of the pack, filmed this horrible spectacle and an act of which evidently they feel proud and that makes them cheerful. Do you know what hurt me? More than their insensitivity, their malice, the brutality of the gesture which could potentially have even cost the victim his life, I was moved by the tenderness and vulnerability of that person who walks uncertainly and seems confused on the seafront, disoriented, a person who would have needing a word, a caress, a smile, which however received a kick in the arm. What is happening to our kids? And what world awaits them?
Lorena Canalis
Dear Lorraine,
the perpetrators of this crime not only demonstrate the insensitivity you speak of but also cowardice. In fact, it is easy to hit and take it out on the most fragile, the defenseless, the single person, when he is alone and at the mercy of anyone. The opportunity is greedy, for such subjects, to demonstrate that they are strong, strong in the pack, a term you used and which is more than fitting. Hence the widespread tendency to document with images and post scenes like that of Bari on the web, actions of which we should be ashamed and yet – paradoxically – we are proud of. The aim is to demonstrate courage. In truth, their act expresses weakness, absence of values, goals, awareness and maturity, inability to feel empathy as well as being at the mercy of an existential boredom to exorcise which one chooses to harm others, anyone who happens to be within reach. . But woe betide us if we consider as victims and pity the young people who are guilty of these crimes seeking social cohesion and aggregation in the commission of group crimes against their peers and beyond. They need to take responsibility, understand the seriousness of their behavior and the resulting consequences both for themselves and for those who suffer such brutality. Otherwise we will never get them back. We will have lost them forever.
We can no longer claim that it is bullying, we can no longer look for justifications, such as they lack love or come from contexts of economic and social hardship. I refuse to listen to this nonsense, repeating which the problem is not solved but rather exacerbated.
The data speaks clearly. The age at which the first crime is committed, therefore not the first mischief, has dropped to fifteen and a half years and the brutality with which crimes are committed has increased, as shown by a study conducted by the Catholic research center Transcrime, which refers to Milan but whose result concerns the entire country. Children with criminal records do not only belong to families without means but are also part of wealthy socio-economic contexts.
And if poverty doesn’t push you towards deviance, then what does?
This is the question we need to ask ourselves. And the need to find an answer is urgent.
Personally I have an idea. I believe that empathy, the ability to identify with others, to sense how they feel, is completely absent in our society. Relationships are sterile, cold, even glacial, increasingly digital and virtual. If the young man who kicked the disabled boy in Bari, causing him to end up in the water, had stopped for a moment to see, as you did, the yoke that weighed on that tender and desperate figure, then he would not have been able to exercise that ferocity.
Maybe he would have approached him to ask: Do you need anything?
And it is in this gesture of love that our being human but also our being men lies. Manliness is not kicking the passerby, but rather holding out your hand.