Let's think again

These are heavy days we are going through. Weapons crackle. Terrorism is rising again. Assorted and terrible barbarisms explode again. Victims are multiplying. People are trampled on. The defenseless are attacked.
Violence is rampant. Houses collapse under bombs and missiles. The displaced are mortified and humiliated. People no longer know where to run or take refuge. Devastating practices such as sieges are returning.
Aid is blocked. Hospitals are hit. Children are killed...

Because of this anguishing darkness it is difficult to find the key to the truth of things, and there are still other gray areas in which tragedies take place without there being any spotlight to highlight their extreme gravity. In the now expanded quadrant of the ongoing crises, not far from our Europe, for example, the news on the forced exile of over one hundred thousand inhabitants of Nagorno Karabakh, of Armenian origin, who were forced to leave everything, without escape, to a tomorrow of scary unknowns.
Without forgetting those who are at the mercy of traffickers and mafias, crossing the sub-Saharan desert and attempting to cross the sea: these faces in a certain popular public opinion do not seem to count because they are reduced to a number or a phenomenon to be discussed (without taking charge).

But a black halo looms over everything: hatred that fuels insult, revenge, irrationality. Today, unfortunately, hatred finds ever more widespread citizenship. And the temptation to get caught up in evil, more or less absolute, more or less exhibited, more or less destructive, is rampant. Hatred then takes on dark colors such as racism, discrimination and intolerance.
Hatred overturns religion, takes it to the extreme on shores of disturbing inhumanity. Hatred overturns and poisons the values of dignity in which everyone is endowed. Hatred does not allow us to recognize the other as a traveling companion, as a brother in humanity. Hatred prevents and blocks a common language, the one through which we understand and respect each other. Unfortunately, the hatred exhibited and practiced seeks out the spotlight to impose itself without restraint as a deadly relational code...
Thus, in these times, violence is made spectacular, leaving people stunned and disconcerted. A turning point is needed. The sociologist Mauro Magatti indicated it in clear words on the pages of Avvenire: «We need another idea of the world that is not the one that is making its way from all sides today, namely that controversies can be resolved by armed conflict. This is what terrorists and dictators have always wanted: to drag the whole world into the spiral of war with their criminal designs." Yes, what if Pope Francis's Fratelli tutti were to be taken back into the hands of Pope Francis to rethink themselves completely anew in the name of common humanity?

Corrado Avagnina
NP November 2023