A somewhat cryptic title of this presentation, which is also the title of the article I published in this issue of “Vision – Another look at the world“.
By fear I mean what we all mean: a psychophysical condition in the face of something that is perceived as threatening, dangerous. Condition that can be positive, if it puts us in an attitude of defense and reaction; or negative, if it paralyzes us and takes away our ability to adequately respond to the event.
My experience, treated and gained thanks to the presence of situations that can produce fear, wars, conflicts, natural disasters, looming phenomena, has led me to contradict many sociologists, psychologists, paediatricians, various pundits. Those who, denouncing the serious health repercussions, especially psychic, traumatic, in particular on children, “poor innocents”, of dramatic or tragic events, in some way favor and enhance the harmful effects that the promoters and managers of such events had promised themselves. Maybe in good faith.
It is that they generalize, they do not distinguish, they make a bundle of every herb that in some way suits their vision of things and, as the case may be, also their pockets. What is a child psychiatrist to do, if one does not diagnose the heavy traumas inflicted on children by Israel’s constant bombing of Gaza, by the sight of their brother being shot and maimed, by his own house reduced to crumbs.
And instead, no. I have been in Gaza, among the people of the endless bombings, of the families chopped up, by the return to the state of cave-dwellers, to survive in the rubble of what was a dignified home. I would like you to see my docufilm “Phoenix Arab, your name is Gaza and listen to that 12-year-old girl tell me how the Israeli war known as “Cast Lead”, that of tanks right into houses, that of twenty explosions a minute, that of the decimation of people fleeing the square by force of machine-gun bursts.
That little girl had the strength, the serenity, of a fighter. She had lost everything, mother, brother, uncles, home, childhood. She had suffered, she suffered, but she was not traumatized, rendered helpless, desperate. She went to school, which had then become a tent. She knew who had hit her, and because she and she knew even better that she belonged to a people, a community, a people who fought, she meant to stand. She knew that if she didn’t go to school, she would be defeated. She knew of the Nakba, of the terrible violence of the invaders, of what those people of hers had suffered and how they had remained standing, ragged, bleeding, but with the light of the horizon, the one behind and the one in front, in the eyes and in the heart .
He had the idea, he wasn’t afraid. She would be ashamed of it, of her fear, in front of her people in resistance. Same goes for the kids of Falls Roads, Belfast, Northern Ireland, generation after generation, for thirty years. The same goes for the Syrians, massacred and plundered by Obama, Trump, Biden, Israel, jihadists. Same speech, same “idea”, for our partisans, of the Risorgimento and of the Resistance. They have the idea, they know who is their enemy and why and what life means resistance. And viceversa. Other than trauma. Resisting is also happiness.
As for the fear that exists when there is no “idea”, just think of those who ran desperately towards the hubs set up by merchants and spreaders Pfizer or Moderna. Those who weren’t afraid had an idea. It was called “No Vax”, or, at least, “No Green Pass”.