I should have written something about Chiara Ferragni, I know. I should have commented on her tears, her face suddenly stripped of make-up and bruised as if she were the protagonist of the picture of Dorian Gray, the pandoro scam and the Easter egg scam, her apologies, the million EUR. I should have said something about the end of the world of influencers, rejoice in them, as if they were the first problem of our time; as if they were all the same, as if there weren’t any good and honest ones.
Stoning always pulls. I should have, I know, but the algorithm that decides which posts I see on social media keeps showing me images of what’s happening in Gaza and I can’t think of anything else. Yesterday I saw a child emerge from the rubble of a bombing carrying the body of another child in his arms. I hoped it was an AI image but it was authentic.
Cecilia Sala, who in the Stories podcast is doing a very important job to transform the accounting of the dead into stories, precisely, into people, yesterday told of another little girl who had lost a leg and her entire family a few days ago, and who was killed while in a hospital: they bombed him. Shortly before, she had asked to be able to come to Europe, wear a prosthesis, and have a normal life.
In Repubblica, Sami al-Ajrami’s daily diary from Gaza promptly lists what the Israeli armed forces have been doing every day for days on a defenseless population: today he defines them as “crimes against humanity”.
So why don’t we really deal with it? Why aren’t they the news of the day? Why don’t we transform the numbers (over twenty thousand deaths) into people? Why don’t we listen to the desperate calls for a ceasefire from those who are there to help, Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children, the Red Cross, Oxfam, Amnesty International? Why do we look the other way? Yes, charity with Chiara Ferragni’s makeup is ugly, but what are we doing to help those who need to be saved from a massacre?
After written. In Gaza it must be said that there is also (above all) the UN. UNRWA has had 104 deaths since the start of the latest crisis. If food arrives it is thanks to WFP. The UN is unable to obtain a ceasefire due to the US and UK veto, but those who continue to say that “the UN is useless” say it because they don’t know what is happening on the ground. Little is known that for many in Gaza these days the UN is literally their only hope of survival.