A few days ago they appeared in Dubai in the streets the first vending machines for free sandwiches. They are bussolotti like those who make coffee and sell snacks and drinks in our offices. But the news is that in this case the sandwiches are free.
The initiative is called Bread for All (in Italian, Bread for All) and according to Sheikh Mohammed, who wanted it, it is a concrete response to poverty and therefore serves to implement one of the slogans of the Emirates, namely that “no one in Dubai goes hungry”. From the point of view of technological innovation it is a trivial and almost inevitable step forward: like the fact that in a church in Turin, the parish priest decided to open to offers through the Satispay app, “because young people never have cash”. Small signs of digital transformation in progress.
But there is an extra thought in what is happening in Dubai. It is not only there digitizationand the depersonalizationaid to the needy of the kind that Caritas makes here: it is also there resa to the social divide. To the fact that we have long been moving towards a society with some getting richer and others getting poorer. Our democracies, on the other hand, grew up around the dream, which some have called the American dream, of social redemption: the fact that everyone must be able to study and have the same opportunities to grow. This thing is less and less true, the famous social elevator has been broken for a while. But instead of finding a way to fix it, we give a subsidy or a sandwich to those who stayed on the ground floor, maybe even because you don’t protest. Let’s be clear: those in difficulty must be helped. All time. But it is very sad a society that keeps the poor with a sandwich instead of creating the conditions for everyone to redeem themselves.