Our fragile summer

It is a fragile summer that is fading before our eyes. Perhaps, with too many silences, few answers, a lot of heat. Of course, the world is starting to turn in the right direction again, but the landscape has changed and is affected by too many independent variables and unbearable voids in values.

The new beginning is green, but pollution continues to grow. In part, it is the fault of the war in Ukraine which releases avalanches of poisons, but also of the still over-used pesticides that find their way into food; even the most supposedly healthy person is "polluted" by our wrong lifestyle.
“Permanent” work remains a chimera for too many, despite a school that, alone and only thanks to the teachers, updates and trains.
Inflation is causing prices, wallets and mortgages to explode; drops but the harmful effects ruin all markets, not just local ones.
Politics is struggling in search of a future and charismatic leaders who, for now, cannot be seen.

Young people continue to say that the elderly "have had their day" and that the young "are too young". Without a pact between the wisdom of the elderly and the energy of the young there is no future.
Faith is, unfortunately, increasingly liquid and rarely transforms into life, testimony, coherence.
Cities and towns have become more frenetic again with the obsession of money, not solidarity.

The pandemic has taught us little. Values have remained as faded as before, except for those of survival and carpe diem.
Public health, Italy's great treasure, has less and less money after 30 years of cuts and certain demonstrations (of those who cut, i.e. right and left!), today, simply make you smile.
The Pope really spends everything but peace is struggling to arrive, despite the efforts, prayers and marches of many. Cardinal Zuppi in Ukraine, Russia, USA: the effort continues.
The earth trembles more than before, lashed by the heat, the wind, the hail, the water bombs. Everything seems to become relative: peace, war, hospitality.

What a strange summer! There is, at times, an unreal silence in the city neighborhoods and towns, especially in the evening hours.
What is going on? Of course, the radical change in social stratification is underway, but there is more, perhaps something that not even the best sociologists are able to intercept, a genetic mutation that is still undefined: what is then needed is additional listening at home, in church, in the street.
The "children's summers" have been a success everywhere, thanks to the parishes, the priests, the volunteers and the dreamers, to many Municipalities, to the foundations which, together, play a substitute role for what the State does not do. It's right? I do not believe.

It is the summer of the banlieues fire in France due to the incredible action of a policeman. That anger, however, could also come to us where too many rights are still ignored or trampled on.
It is the summer of shipwrecks: even in this case we need listening, availability, outstretched hands, not proclamations or even more walls! And the paradox grows: in the Mediterranean of cruises, even the last ones drown and, perhaps, even more.
It is the summer of the elderly alone: at home, in nursing homes, in church because the Milan cathedral, half empty for the farewell to those who died in the fire, hurts inside. Much.
It is the summer of memories, but it can become that of hope and "restart", the real one on the "paths of faith". Simply, with your gaze on the cross, even those in the mountains!


Gian Mario Ricciardi
NP August / September 2023