Not Being Overwhelmed

The wars next door, the ones that touch us only partially, are a great test of oneself. The challenge is to stay upright in the face of so much decay. A cognitive and ethical decay that reached its peak during the pandemic years, but which keeps renewing itself, because we must remember that the "human" material is the same and nothing has improved in the meantime.

Of course, wars that strike directly are a different test, more intense but of another kind. Today we are living through a period of "nearby" wars.

The mind must not waver. The media, all of them, whatever ideology they serve, tell us nothing truly neutral and are often weapons of mass distraction. Does anyone in their right mind really believe that the aim of the current war in the Middle East is to "liberate the Iranian people"?

No one with a shred of intellectual vitality should fall into such a trap, and there is not much point in debating it either, because the real purpose is not that. It is equally clear that international law has often been a scrap of paper, and not only today: those who believed in it often keep chasing unreal shadows.

Our human sense must not waver. Because war, for those who are truly living through it, is not a video game. It is not two sides, one of goodies and one of baddies, facing each other: they are human beings, sometimes caught up in it without having chosen it.

When you read "ship shot down", it is not like a goal scored during a match: that ship held people, and those people had families who will suffer because of it.

We must not fall into oversimplification. Wars have always existed and, in some form, will probably always exist. They are not simply right or wrong: they seem to be part of who we are.

That is why the "pacifist" simplification risks becoming another way of closing our eyes. Because if you close your eyes and keep repeating that something is wrong, I'm sorry, but that thing will not disappear.

m.m.