Waiting for the tractors – la Repubblica

In Rome we are here waiting for the tractors. They say the traffic will go crazy. Maybe. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time. We will survive this too. After all, the right to protest is sacrosanct even if it brings some discomfort, even if it is students who protest, even if environmentalists do it. However, I thought back to the last time we said to each other that we would die from traffic, that moving to Rome would be impossible, that it was all over, that we had to protest. It was Saturday 21 October and the traffic in Piazza Venezia was changing. It changed due to the opening of a huge construction site, an infinite construction site, a fundamental construction site: in ten years Rome will finally have a metro network worthy of a capital and there in Piazza Venezia there will be the main stop and it will be the most beautiful metro station of the world, embellished by the finds that will come out of the excavations of the Forum. Ten years is a long time, it’s true, but in life usually to solve the problems that really matter there is no easy win: it’s not like drawing the winning lottery ticket, rather it’s like the procedure with the which solves a quadratic equation. It takes many steps, many operations, and then you make it. In those days the traffic went crazy, and then it didn’t. Probably some correction has been made, or perhaps we are used to it and many simply take a different ride. The moral is that the world did not end as many said. Just as it hasn’t become impossible to get around in Bologna which for three weeks has imposed a speed limit of thirty kilometers per hour and on the first day, even there, many were shouting that their lives were over, that they would lose their jobs and their children would not reach school. The truth is that we complain about everything but we are not willing to change anything and those who try to change things instead of applause, instead of thanks, instead of advice, always find themselves facing a wall. Many on that wall crash and come back. Others take a ladder and patiently climb all the steps. Only then do things really change.