Pandemic. The before and after in Italy that wants to be reborn

There are two main factors of change in human life: time and trauma. What they are capable of causing is not predictable. A plane crashes, there are dead, wounded, unharmed. After months or years a confirmation is made on what happened to the survivors: someone has followed a spiritual path, one has become a clown, others have resumed their life as if nothing had happened; there are those who are marked, those who have sued the airline, those who think in various languages ​​that a higher will has been made. The effect depends not only on the cause, but on the subject. Alongside “time will tell” it is commonplace “you become what you are”. And therefore to think about how two years of pandemic have influenced our lives, beyond shared appearances, must take into account the gaps, the extremes that do not make the media and look for a common denominator. Time, if it does not say so, suggests it, even if we mark it with artificial sequences and make “coupons” at pre-established deadlines. So to try to understand the effect after two years I went to review the reflections of a year ago.

At the time, one would think that the pandemic had brought us back to a childhood condition. He had imposed on us the first characteristic of existence when we are small: the limit. He stayed at home, mostly in the bedroom because, we were told, it’s dangerous out there. If you ever left, you had to come back within a certain time, after which a curfew was applied. The delays involved punishment. The night was a foreign country, foreign countries were blacked out. Even to visit grandparents or see friends, precise conditions and reasons were required. We lived or relived a solitude as an only child, a shyness in approaching anyone belonging to minors. Smart working like homework. Everything took place within the perimeter drawn up by an authority (the State, in place of the parents). The space had expanded. Time had stopped flowing in the usual way, losing reference points such as the weekend, leaving the activities of all the other seasons to summer. Aware that there is no dogma or talisman that dispenses with our vulnerability, and that the perfect geometry of karma is illusory, I wondered: how will we come out of it? Answering with 5 words: we just have to grow.

Heroes, mistakes and successes of the two governments in the fight against the virus

by Alessandra Ziniti

February 19, 2022

More or less, this is what happened: a year later, and two years after the first Italian death from the consequences of the virus, we are in an adolescent phase. If the child accepts the limit, the adolescent fights him, also because he sees the border approaching and craves. There is a whole world that awaits him “when he grows up” or “when he turns eighteen”. Frustrated by the lived condition and fibrillated by the expectation, he invokes and demands it. The authority hitherto respected with difficulty is questioned or openly opposed. The political and the scientific: entering a Checco Zalone parody means having closed a circle that inscribes the well-known comic arithmetic operation = tragedy + time.

Adolescence archives the age of innocence. He takes note of the death, of the lie, even of the vague uselessness of making sense of the whole path. Historical remedy? Dance on it. How, if the clubs are closed? Rebellion has a clear object and a more indistinct purpose. He knows what he wants to eliminate, but in favor of what else? Meanwhile, let’s go out, then we’ll see. Take a Pavlovian reflex. It is known that it is enough to say “do not think about the elephant” for the pachyderm to appear in the interlocutor’s mind. And it is enough to say “nothing will be the same” for that “before”, designated as impossible, to become the clear object of desire. It is enough for a parent to deny any choice made by the seventeen-year-old son for it to become irrevocable. He wants the “before” back even if two years and a day ago we hated it. The traffic jams in the streets, the crowds in public places, the kisses and hugs at the end of the evening with guys just met, the colds from the open nose, all madeleines of an era that was happy only because it “was”. The eternal trap of nostalgia: we will be worse even when we are better. We are better off. The other cliché “every crisis is an opportunity” has taken for granted the fact of being a truncated sentence, always missing “for a few”. For many, for most: a crisis is a crisis. And adolescence is a succession of it because she breaks all security pacts, exposes to the wind that messes up the cards, announces the inevitability of a storm along the way.

The recurring question of children is “Why?” and in fact in the first year the cause was sought among more or less well-founded possibilities. Now it is only important to go further: “When?”. Gigi Riva is right in his book “the cruelest of months” to reject the comparison between the pandemic and the war. There is no wolf man for man here. Yet some fights between canids broke out. Baby-gang, nothing more. I No Vax against Ultra Vax. The first fewer, but more noisy. The latter, already in the reflective phase, ready to ask themselves if they have not exaggerated; if after all, as libertarians, they should not have consented, with the usual doubts and distinctions that end up leaving the handle of history to those who wield it with the firmness of intransigence. Marketing has thrived on categories, creating small (and transitory?) Fortunes, even editorial, even political, as on adolescent tastes.

Here we are and it is perplexing to already hear about the post-pandemic, even if the bulletin bores us, we are used to the hundreds of victims and the method of calculation is disputed. Another variant is possible and against another winter of our discontent we have more aids than vaccination efficacy, to avoid recurrent boosters. Immunity must coincide with maturity. What cannot be eliminated is assimilated. There was slag in the first, there is good in this present. Verification, on the third anniversary.