The measure of Humanity
The measure of Humanity
Faced with the scenarios that afflict our world, faced with the pain that every war causes to men, women, children, the elderly, defenseless people, we can assume any attitude: we can condemn war, wherever it comes from, we can criticize those who foment it , initiates, provokes or implements it.
We can take sides in favor of one reason or another.
But war is the ancient act of Cain against Abel and as in the Hebrew Bible, Cain represents the son of Adam and Eve, that is, the son of this humanity that kills, which arrogates to itself the right to take away life and freedom with an act that it cannot find justification in any right and in any morality.
It is the denial of freedom, to which we all have a right when we are born.
In the face of war, we can experience feelings of a different nature; we can criticize, contest, take to the streets, feel anger, pain.
All human feelings, all more or less legitimate and understandable.
But today I am more afraid of that part of humanity that quarrels on social networks, that makes itself “war” by discussing war, that also uses outrageous and provocative languages.
I am afraid of the status of a humanity that speaks and no longer listens; I am afraid of the status of opposition, of anger and judgment: Cain against Abel in so many manifestations.
We have obtained the opportunity to express ourselves on social networks but we have almost lost the ability to listen to each other in person and (apart from the pandemic from Covid-19) we have lost the ability to forgive ourselves, to apologize, to do the mea culpa in many things.
We are more connected but we are disconnected; we are globalized but more and more atoms; we are all-rounders but we are losing the sense of the Truth of Life.
We raise our voices at every corner, with tones so high, internal and external, that we hear only our ego, increasingly poor and isolated; we scream at Abel and we no longer notice the Cain inside us.
Our talk is louder than the din of the bombs themselves; our language kills more than many splinters, and while wars are fought outside of us, on too many fronts the war we fight every day makes us forget the most important part of life itself: humanity.
Closed in our more or less large homes and certainties we forget to exercise the only thing that gives us the real possibility of redemption.
We are not valid as far as we are right in a given subject or as far as we are holders of more or less partial truths.
All this is garbage and to put it like Mahatma Gandhi “For me, politics stripped of religion is absolute filth, always to be avoided”.
Put simply, since we are political beings and every act we carry out or implement is political, the only thing that matters now is not who is right or who is wrong.
What matters now is the act that gives us (with all our defects and often meanness) human value: welcome, help, aid to the suffering populations.
It is time to tone it down, to be silent and to operate.
It is time to come close, to give something of our own, bringing about the only revolution that defeats war: solidarity.
We welcome children, the elderly, families; we donate food, basic necessities, everything we can but not the superfluous.
We welcome these brothers who have only their pay for war: pain and suffering.
Everything else is rhetoric and the result of all the negativities that, in one way or another, have lurked in our life and prevent us from understanding and acting correctly.
The same street demonstrations against the war (beautiful and moving things) not followed by this way of acting become external and constructless acts.
The enemy (evil) is defeated with good. Everything else is a swim in the mud of life.
It is no longer the time for reasons or for wrong, because when there is war, in some way (even if in a small way) there is our responsibility.
At the end of this reading I hope that each of us gets in touch with whoever can (associations, neighbors, friends, organizations, etc.) to make a small gesture; that small gesture that is the only legitimate weapon: the one that defeats war.
Let’s do it in silence because the weapon of good makes no fuss.
Guido Bissanti