Reality, once again.

[nausicaa83]

I spent the entire morning refreshing news sites. This morning, a bomb exploded in front of a school in Brindisi, a city in Southern Italy. A young girl died, many kids were hurt, everyone is in shock. No one claimed the action yet, but it's almost definitely to blame on the local mafia network, the Sacra Corona Unita, the Sacred Crown. In a few days it'll be the 20th anniversary of the death of judge Falcone, killed by mafia, and the school bears his name, and there's no such thing as coincidence.

Now, the even scarier part is that when we turned on the tv, the computer, the radio this morning, we all felt that a new era of terror is beginning. In Italy we had what we call the Anni Di Piombo, the Lead Years. It's a long period, back when my parents were young, when terrorists of different political views, but who all shared the same goal, put bombs in train stations, art exhibitions, public squares, banks, killing hundreds of innocent persons. Everybody lived knowing that fear. In the early nineties, it was mostly the mafia, to counterattack laws againts them. I was a kid, but I still remember clearly my mom hearing of Judge Borsellino's death, and bursting into tears in the middle of the street, where my sister and I were playing. She tried to explain to us what had happened, but she couldn't stop crying.

So today that fear is back. It's a fear I inherhited from my parents, when my dad wouldn't throw away a kleenex in a garbage bin on the street, but would put it in his pocket so he could throw it away at home, because he couldn't shake the feeling that there could be a bomb inside that bin. Today everything my parents feared has come to life, once again.

Comments

[stardust-made.livejournal.com]

I read about it this morning—it's shocking, very, very sad, and so wrong! We try to make sense of evil, but we don't need to look far at all, not to other planets, not to some supernatural powers, not to some religious preachings. It's cold-blooded immorality, that's what it is. There is money at the bottom of it, which makes it very rational for me and too horrible. That poor girl and her family.

I'm sorry that you're feeling this fear today. It's the purpose of terror—to fill you in and keep you locked, restricted. I think I've mentioned that I still lived on London when the bombings happened. My train was a stop away from one of the targeted spots. I was on my way to work as usual when all of a sudden everything went dark. There was no message on the speakers, nothing for a while. I didn't think that much of it at first, because such breaks used to happen (some lines are very old), but as the pause grew to over fifteen-twenty second, and then stretched into a minute, I just knew something was wrong. Then the train driver appologized for the delay, after another few minutes the lights came on and we moved on...for me to arrive at my station fifteen minutes later to a number of scared messages and voicemails on my mobile from people checking on me. (No coverage underground.)

I couldn't even go back home that day; London was paralyzed. I stayed at a friend's house and that was a pretty grim dinner we had. On the next morning I got to the nearest Underground station. It was so, so eerie and quiet—and London quiet during a weekday is a scary place. I remember looking at the open carriage, waiting for the passengers. It was the first stop of the Jubilee Line, for which I had fondness because it took me to my college on Baker Street, to Regents Park, and to the heart of London. (A year later it was to become the line that took me to the place I think of home when I think of London and it remained my 'home' line until I left the country a few years later.) Because it was the first stop, the train just stood there, empty and silent, doors open. I thought it looked like home to me. I thought I had to get on that train, no matter how shaken I still was. It was like, "This is my life. This is MY train. This is OUR life here and these are OUR trains and this is London so fuck off you stupid, horrible people." I'll never forget how I stepped in and sat down, then welled up immediately. And God, the quiet. I think there was only one more person in my carriage.

Sorry for the long post! I just wanted to say that you have my sympathy and understanding about that feeling of fear. It lingered in London for years to come.:/

[nausicaa83.livejournal.com]

I think the worst part about it is that it's caused by other men. We had a terrible earthquake three years ago that destroyed an entire city. We had floodings in Genova that looked like the end of the world. And that was so scary. But this, this was made by human beings. I could get on the bus and sit right next to them.

This is what I can't understand, a person wakes up in the morning, drinks his coffee, pops into his car, and drops a backpack with a bomb in front of a school. How can they even do it? They're not crazy, they're not sick: when they catch them, they're all so calm and collected. They think they're defending their rights, and so they abduct kids and melt them in acid, torture their own sisters because they talked to the cops, and put bombs in front of schools. How can we even belong to the same species?

[stardust-made.livejournal.com]

I know! It's utterly incomprehensible! And that's what I meant when I said it wasn't anything complex like religious fanaticism or such. This is all about money and interests and preserving power through fear. (Which, of course, fanaticism also is, now that I think of it.) Any way you look it, it is despicable and I don't know how these people can just...be.

[nausicaa83.livejournal.com]

Yep, it's the kind of fear that comes from other persons hurting you. In my experience, having cancer was freaking scary, but not as mom's accident. It didn't just happen for the sake of happening, it was someone's doing.

And the government is to blame too. All mafias grew much more powerful during the last few years because of the corruption that it's destroying our country. Some even say giving money to the mafia is better than paying taxes because they protect their territory. And when they teach a different way of thinking in school, they kill the kids.