Epidemic-epitome

Bologna, March 19th 2020. In Italy, Father's Day. (Dedicated to my loving and deeply missed daddy)


I now realize a long time has passed since my last post. "Time frys" as they say.

Now the epidemy has hit our beautiful Europe. We are coping with it, and in some ways the same trends of coping we saw in China took shape also in the so-called West: denial-fear-adaptation. The same is happening in other more "Western" countries. Human being is a big collective differentiated unit.

This social separation we are experiencing in this period is really "scar(r)y", it will leave deep scars in our societies.

The last three generations (or a big part of individuals belonging to the post-WW2 generation) have been living celebrating a global unity, pursuing the ideal of socializing, sharing, mixing, with no fear, and,  though keeping a deep trust in science, leaving a door open to other ways of enquiring reality.

My great-grandmother's and my grandmother's generation were raised in fear: fear of the unknown, of the unvisible, fear of the other, dependence on "those who know"– the scientists – fear of death. Death  from desease: my great-grandmother's mother died of Spanish flu when she was 14 and she had to raise 5 siblings by herself; death from war: my mother was born under a WW2 bomb raid, in an underground shelter. From my mother's generation onword, we all thought we were "the Untouchables", that science can defy desease, democracy can defy war and nothing can stop us. Our feeling of power allowed us to set no limits to the exploitation of nature.

Now it is unimaginable for us to see the rebirth of new boundaries, new fears; once again the invisible has come to threaten us, we feel we are losing power. 

The human species at birth is powerless and unprotected. The protection of babies which runs through the arms of an individual - the mother or any other caretaker - is the first cultural transmission the human being encounters in the course of life. It teaches us how to survive. We survive because we act culture.

When all this will be over, our culture will have deeply changed: maybe just our gestures (no kissing, no hand-shaking, but a healthier "namaste" or a new elbow-touching or foot-shanking, who knows), or our bodies (a bit fatter, probably, from  lack of exercise  in our small abodes),  or maybe a profound re-set of our position in society and in Nature. As well as a new political vision of the state, probably. 

In these days our bodies and minds are collectively struggling to build a new culture. This is a transition period and it will be hard, as usually transition periods are. Let's live it in peace, serenity, with the resources we have developed during our lucky generations: sharing, mixing, with no fear and with open hearts.