Resilience and responsibility

If we want to focus on the complicated season we are experiencing, perhaps we need to refer to the figure of precariousness, which we thought we had set aside with the anti-Covid vaccines after the distressing months of the lockdown. In fact, we are plagued by a range of critical issues that add up and intertwine. Meanwhile, the virus is not completely defeated, and is raising its head again. Maybe it's no longer scary, but it's not to be taken lightly.

Then – as we all know – there is war which has been present on the European scene for months now with its trail of victims, destruction, threats, risks of escalation, violence, hatred, lacerations. The instances of peace seem unable to break through the logic of conflict that fills the skies and makes the fronts incandescent.

Then the spiral of the "war" on energy supplies was triggered, with the risk of being cold in the coming winter and not being able to withstand the increases in prices and bills. On this terrain, troubles are rising in tone. There are those who say, doing the math (perhaps approximate), that the worst is yet to come. And as a result everything becomes uncertain and uncertain. Perhaps the reduced or zeroed Christmas lights to save money don't change our lives, but they represent a sign that the paradigm of our society is in crisis and needs to be rethought.

More worrying are the situations in which many companies reduce their activity and production, or close their doors, unable to bear unsustainable increases. And then the daily shopping bag for families is becoming more and more expensive: salaries and pensions are not adjusted to the emergency. In short, personal experience and social life are on the gridiron of what may happen. Psychologically, a trait of fear that goes beyond worry also seems to make its way. The fear of the war that is not far off now also generates marked anxiety about the intertwining of assorted uncertainties about the present and the future of families.

It is in a context like this, in which inequalities are becoming more and more excruciating, that the time can strike for solidarity, for sharing, for giving each other a hand, for feeling everyone is on a rocking boat. Resilience becomes urgent, but it must be fueled by responsibility. Politics, the economy, the institutions must strike a serious blow. From below, alone, you cannot face what is dangerously around the corner.


Corrado Avagnina
NP November 2022