Strange but true!

Mario Draghi, Prime Minister, does not go on television, does not accept invitations of any kind to talk shows, does not participate in debates under the spotlight and does not grant mass media interviews of any color or part; he speaks the bare minimum and only in official offices ... Not a public man, but practically an extraterrestrial in the Italian panorama.

Matteo Salvini, party leader with 17% of the votes, plays politics in front of the cameras, does not shy away from journalists' questions, takes advantage of every opportunity presented to him to place his bearded face on television and thrives on proclamations entrusted to the ether which are his real political program. In a recent media outlet, he took up a theme particularly dear to him, the restoration of compulsory military service.

Umberto Galimberti, philosopher, academic and psychoanalyst, in his recent speech on the world of youth, among other things, called for the total removal of parents from the world of school for therapeutic purposes and a return to a teaching staff free from any kind of interference that has nothing to do with teaching, its timing and its rules.

Three well-known personalities who have little else in common other than the fact that in their convinced stances, they somehow contrast with a way of being and thinking very common among young people and their daily menage populated by false idols and disproportionate safeguards. Appearance first of all, the guiding star of a generation that to exist must live perpetually connected and possibly in front of a smartphone turned on in video mode, be relaunched on social networks, pursue new contacts and likes at all costs, transform every gesture, every action and every choice in image to be consecrated to the ether under penalty of a dark and mysterious oblivion. Not just going out with friends and giving vent to the corporality and physicality typical of youth but withdrawing into your own world, often your own room, to dedicate yourself and give yourself to the screen in the electronic dim light, sheltered from real society.

Even the compulsory military service, so dear to Salvini, is for them a bugbear of the past, destinations far from home, orders and uniforms will no longer kidnap them for the usual 12 months of naja, away from the family and its overprotective dynamics. The term obedience, as abused in the barracks as it is unknown in the home, has disappeared from the stripped-down lexicon of youth. Moreover, the military is certainly not the solution to the problem. The civil service and an organized form of volunteering would certainly lead them in the right direction. And to finish the school, the last bulwark of education and socialization imposed by the State, increasingly gagged and conditioned by hordes of parents who ultimately aspire not to the training of children but exclusively to their protection, as if the school community and the teaching staff were a formidable opponent to fight and not a tool for growth, comparison and, why not, a challenge with oneself and one's limits.

The pandemic that continues certainly does not help to defeat the fears and loneliness of individuals, but frankly too many safeguards and certainties risk preventing us from being able to break the shell that we are building around ourselves.

Michelangelo Dotta
NP February 2022