Is the crossing over?

It is our crossing of the desert which, perhaps, paradoxically ends, while so does the brutal Russian aggression of Ukraine among deaths, crimes and bombs. We are, ideally, between two walls of water which, as then, risk drowning us: war and peace, peace and Covid. And, in our days and nights, fear remains. Then, as now, we live between certainties, fog, confusion and misinformation, between discouragement, fear, sometimes panic. And yet, this is the way. These are the hours of the beginning of the end of the most difficult days of two years, with the hope that even the hatred that kills in the east will dissolve. The virus, with which we must deal, teaches us something fundamental: a society like ours, at the forefront of technology, medicine, forecasts of the future, brought to its knees, in chaos and fear, by a very small virus that scared us like an invincible monster and forced us to radically change our daily life. The experience we are living teaches us that we should be much humbler and that life and death, time and the future do not belong to us.

We have been hearing about quarantine for 24 months. Forty is an important symbolic number in the Bible and also the sign of maturity. Forty years hard the path of the Jews in the desert; as many were the years of David's reign. From this number the life of Moses was marked: at the age of 40 he descends among his slave brothers in Egypt; for 40 years he leads the people across the desert; finally, after another 40 years, he climbs Mount Nebo to finally see the land promised by God; Jesus spends 40 days in the desert fasting; Lent lasts 40 days. The forty years of the people of God teach us to redo history, to resume our journey, imitating the experience of the people in the desert. It is a path that leads to a personal rediscovery of life and relationships. For the post-Covid and post-war period, we need vaccines of solidarity and humanity. So, barefoot on the sand, dressed in rags and animal skins, under tents, among goats, in absolute poverty, in total uncertainty and in fear of nothing beyond the dunes or the mountain. Now, with the pandemic in our homes, in the heat, with the fridge full, the television on, the computer always connected to the internet and the mobile phone constantly hooked up to draw hope, but in a dramatic scenario that distresses, a collective tragedy that, every day, it still produces bulletins with heavy figures, has closed companies, towns, cemeteries and reopened closed hospitals to welcome the sick. This crossing was tough. Very hard for hospitals overflowing beyond belief, terrible for those who, sick, felt short of breath, incredible for those who, fortunately, were not infected. We did not go out; we spent hours at the window dreaming of the end… Maybe it's coming. It is true that it always takes a dream to walk, to fight, to resist. And, that of those eternal days, was a new resistance. And, luckily, the vaccines have arrived. Covid and then the war at the gates: two lessons of how small man is, a help to return to the essential. Everything around us, all values, really everything, is revised, re-examined, reset. The superfluous is set aside; the necessary found in a ranking that will never be the same again, also because after the pandemic the missiles and cluster bombs arrived, two hours by plane from us.

Yes, the crossing is ending; he still left dead and wounded on the ground; it has reduced a lot of money on the stock exchange to ashes (and multiplied those of many speculators); undermined the economy of everyone, of Italy, of Europe, of the world and like a threatening cloud it will stretch over the next months and years, but it was the only way out of the desert of the soul in which we were suddenly , wake up on March 9, 2020.

Gian Maria Riacciardi
NP Aprile 2022