“The Lord give you another hundred years!”
Fabrice, ayant l'air de marcher au hasard, advances to the nef droite de l'église, jusqu'au lieu ses cierges étaient allumés; If you are fixated on Cimabué's madone, then say it to Pépé in s'agenouillant: The fact that I make thanks an instant; Pépé imitates him. After the glise, Pépé remarqua que Fabrice donnait une pièce de vingt francs au premier fear here he demands the aumône; the mendiant jeta des cris de reconnaissance qui attractérent sur les pas de l'être charitable les nuées de pauvres de tout genre qui ornent d'ordinaire la place de Saint-Pétrone. Tous voulaient avoir leur part du napoléon. Les femmes, désepérant de pénétrer dans la mêlée qui l'entourait, fondrent sur Fabrice, he criant s'il n'était pas vrai qu'il avait voulu donner son napoléon pour être divisé parmi all les pauvres du bon Dieu. Pépé, brandissant sa canne à pomme d'or, leur ordonna de laisser son excellence tranquille.
(… more and more often "mon excellence" comes across beggars, that is, those people who offer us the opportunity to concretely help that humanity for which we are all willing to spend ourselves in the abstract, those people who pose, to whoever wants to ask themselves two challenging questions: "how did he manage to become like this?" and "what would I do in his place?". Every time, I inevitably think of the young Del Dongo, overwhelmed in the churchyard of San Petronio by unpredictable consequences. of his dreamy and impulsive generosity. The instinctive reaction of many, often mine too, is to ignore this presence that is more disturbing than annoying. It is not easy to sustain the gaze of someone who, abdicating his own dignity, relies on the solidarity of others. Not it is, because it is not easy to ask, it is not easy to confess one's fragility in public, and conversely it is not easy to be shaken in one's certainty of being safe. Because as it happened to him, so it could happen to you. Of course, even in this, as in other cases, you must be wary of professionals! However, on the one hand, I don't know about you, but it happens to me more and more that I find people "like us" reaching out, people who are visibly educated and polite, desperately clinging to that minimum level of decorum that conditions allow them, people who approach whispering, who clearly still don't give up, don't want to admit that they are forced to do so much to get by. People, to simplify, who would like to work, who perhaps have had a job, or a pension. On the other hand, even if they were lazy men, the fact would remain that they are men, and certainly, if on the one hand subsidizing the lazy man is an incentive – this is the usual argument of those who shirk – on the other hand, especially if you are or you think you are Christian, you may have read "te autem faciente eleemosynam, nesciat left your quid faciat dextera tua, ut sit eleemosyna tua in abscondito, et Pater tuus, qui videt in abscondito, reddet tibi." In short, the works of mercy should not be optional for us , and I give you some bad news: the package does not only include the corporal mercy of the eret hastily abandoned in the hands of others, but the spiritual mercy of endurance should also be included. and of consolation, in short: of listening, or, if you want, of what we objectively cannot give, because we first of all, alas, don't have it: time.
After all, we could also tell ourselves that a welfare state exists, and that it should take care of it. The theory is here , and here . It would be useful to understand, case by case, whether and how much it helps individual particular cases, but, in fact, it would take time, the time that perhaps I should take for this, as for other things – including dialogue with you – but which is sacrificed in the name of more pressing needs (if you want them, you can always find them).
Yesterday "mon excellence" was leaving one of the palaces of real power, where he had discussed more or less relevant matters with a holder of real power, and on a corner of Via del Corso he came across an elderly lady, not too shabby. I continued on, then I don't know why I stopped, I searched my pockets, I went back, and I gave her a not too crumpled piece of paper. Apparently what didn't change my life changed hers: it's called marginal utility! Surprised and confused, the lady expressed her thanks. And I, worried about a possible "San Petronio effect", told her that she shouldn't, that it was the least I could do (but evidently it was much beyond the maximum of what the others did), that I wished her a good day and that I he was sorry he couldn't hold me back.
And she: "You are a good person, the Lord give you another hundred years!"
And I said: "Thank you, but I need a lot less!"… )
(… but is it really like that? …)
(… you will have noticed a certain difficulty on my part in continuing our journey here. I can no longer keep up with this like with many other things, including those I have sacrificed for this. The time I can dedicate to you has become compressed, my now it is a life of meetings, meetings to organize, meetings to participate in, and practices to instruct. Solitude has become a scarce resource, reading a lost paradise, including your comments, which I also no longer have time to respond to, and so the dialogue between us frays…
[break]
[here in the middle there were three phone calls and infinite Whatsapp messages about a dispute regarding something that happened in a region]
….it slowly, inexorably frays. I feel that I lose you and we lose ourselves while the moment would require us to be more steadfast than ever, because the enemy is in trouble, and this makes him particularly insidious, and because you have demonstrated, with your presence, that you are able to help us define a more rational line (there is a clear cause-effect relationship between FinDay and the vote on the ESM). On the other hand, in these forced pauses so many issues accumulate, there are so many things I would like to discuss with you (almost every day opens with a confirmation of the scenarios we have outlined over the years, starting from those determined by the predictable difficulties of France and Germany), that on the one hand the narrative engine is swamped due to over-feeding, and on the other, however, the reduced time to process all these confirmations risks confining the blog to a cloying, notary, self-satisfied enumeration of things we had said to each other, because we lack the time, the dialogue, the discussion necessary to understand together where these things are leading us.
But are we sure we haven't understood it, are we sure we want to understand it, and are we sure we haven't already told ourselves?
In the end, we will go where it was inevitable that we would go. When I told you in 2011 that Germany would saw off the branch it was sitting on, it was quite clear to me, and, I'm sure, it was clear to you too, that we were sitting on a lower branch. We are in that recurring moment in history where capitalism must revive the cycle of accumulation. Here now there can be no recovery without reconstruction, and for there to be reconstruction, as I told you in one of the last Facebook live broadcasts, of those fragments of time that I manage to dedicate to you, there must be destruction. As simple as that. Even "green" in its own way was a reconstruction, the reconstruction of a world (the green one) that had never existed. Apparently this exempted us from the unpleasant task of destroying it, but in reality "lu grin" was equally destructive and disintegrating for our industrial fabric and for our daily lives, it was a highway towards the definitive and total subordination of our countries, and therefore it's not working (s'ha mort) because the citizens, rightly, don't want it. There is another thing that no one wants, in the abstract, but which then presents itself in concrete terms, and we will focus on that one, on the great classics: if debt must be – and it cannot fail to be, given the imbalances within the area, self-inflicted imbalances, but no less real – then debt it is, but at least war debt, debt made for a "good" reason: the production and purchase of weapons. Are we sure we never told ourselves this? I am almost sure that I have written to you several times that the tensions generated by our absurd rules would inevitably have led to a similar relief valve. The removal of inhibitory brakes, if on the one hand it frees us from the sugary hypocrisy that for years presented colonial conflicts to us as "peace missions", on the other hand it is an element of obvious anxiety.
In the end, my lassitude, my disaffection, also come from the fact that I would like everything except to write the definitive QED, also because in these times it is not known whether if it were to appear there would be the time or the way to write it, nor benefit of whom it would be written.
But in short, perhaps I'm too pessimistic: it may be time, it may be the years that pass, it may be the frustration of not always being able to give back the much you have given me or take the much you still have to give me, but we cannot resolve this curiosity either: the newspapers say that I am involved in drawing up the program for the European elections, which in my opinion would be very simple to write: less Europe!, and there must be some truth in what the newspapers say, because in a while I will a call… )
(… and therefore, thinking about it better, in fact another 100 years would be useful, especially if it were possible to receive them in two or three tranches to live at the same time, because alone it is really complicated! See you soon as I have to talk to you about the #midterm .. .)
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2024/03/il-signore-ti-dia-altri-cento-anni.html on Tue, 26 Mar 2024 17:47:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.