by Enzo Bozza
15 MAG – Dear Director,
the World Health Organization has declared the Sars-Cov2 emergency over. Now it is possible to estimate the damage and draw conclusions. But it is not the simple count of the victims that provides an authentic face to the tragedy, because mourning cannot have a numerical dimension. Anyone who has lost just one person has actually lost everything and, however sympathetic it is to consider how many people are no longer there, the drama is experienced in solitude. The silent and meaningless one, as death always is. The only possible human resource is reflection and, with it, a possible catharsis of the drama. The funeral rite, the last farewell, the final farewell from those who have represented their human existence, for better or for worse, are part of the symbolic rites.
The representation of the many “as if” that the human soul needs to find its own peace. Death abruptly ends a relationship, the many things left unsaid need forgiveness because death always leaves survivors with many unsaid, unsaid and heavy words like feelings of guilt. Then the funeral rite celebrates as if one could still talk to someone who is no longer there. As if the last word were pronounced by those condemned to eternal silence, as if we survivors could say what we would never have said. The funeral rite is a catharsis. One of the many mental representations to tie the threads of life which is and remains chaotic and casual, but our mind needs finished pictures, finished works, purpose and meaning. This is why rituals as if have always existed. It is the same fantastic representation of children when they play: let’s say that you were and I was…Reality is overcome and another, representative, symbolic one is invented. Where it all comes back. The as if of children is the metaphysics we need to live, because reality doesn’t have a meaning and it doesn’t add up.
A disturbing aspect of the Covid era does not return: a large group of skeptics have denied the role and importance of Medicine. In one century, the life expectancy of the population has more than increased, from 50 to the current 83 years, also thanks to health technology as well as improved living conditions. Yet, many have subverted the medical paradigm, from a noble and deserving profession, medicine has become an enemy, conspiracy and deception. A vulgar and ignorant individualism, above all ignorant of one’s own ignorance, has brought down the social dimension of care. The social role of medicine for which prevention, egalitarianism and assistance for all have fallen into the pit of existential selfishness of those who live only on social media and misinformation.
Illnesses often reveal the true face of the person. Covid has revealed two of them: arrogance as a direct consequence of the ignorance of too many. Arrogance and ignorance: it is curious that hyperinformation coincides with appalling social illiteracy. If Culture is a fugitive, it becomes inevitable to fall into a social regression from the Middle Ages. This aspect is much more serious than the number of deaths caused by Covid, because if it is true that the pandemic is over, the next victims will not be the result of a virus, but the many social deaths linked to this social Middle Ages: refugees, the unemployed, women raped and killed, babies left in the trash, meaningless violent deaths, bullying.
War, on the other hand, has always been in fashion because a worse enemy than ignorance is power. The stupidest way to imitate God instead of resembling him with the greatest gift we have been granted: humanity, that is, love for man.
Enzo Bozza
General practitioner in Vodo and Borca di Cadore (BL)
15 maggio 2023
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