FIFTH COLUMN
by Marcello Veneziani
Dear Boy born in 2000, I thought of you in the twentieth century as a mythological figure, a kind of Martian who would have inhabited other worlds, it would have fed itself in other ways, it would have traveled to other galaxies. This was the euphoric promise that circulated in the sixties of the last century, at the turn of space conquests and beyond. It was the dream of escaping from the ideological and bellicose twentieth century to enter a millennium that was neither red nor black, but milky like the street of the same name, and glassy, as befits transparent video.
Father of two children born in the last millennium, I dreamed of having a third child in the third millennium and to joke with immortality, I also promised a fourth child in the fourth millennium... But then life took another turn.
Now I'll meet you around, I touch you on the street, I pass you while you're leaving school or going to university, and I see you all too much like me, ours, brontosaurs of the past millennium. But under the skin of a resemblance, if I then look into your life, in your lexicon, in your imagination, in your knowledge, I find an abyss of differences. Some are definitely to your advantage: the ability to inhabit technology and the globe, with a mastery that we didn't have, the ability to navigate the mathematical universe, your refractoriness to collective dreams, except for environmentalist flare-ups in the name of Gretology, the new planetary sect. But the feeling that comes over me is exactly the opposite of what the average person makes you perceive, school & global agencies: they made you believe you had a longer view, wider, global, compared to previous generations.
But if you think about it, your world is much smaller than the provincials of the past, and I'll try to explain it to you. You live on a slice so thin and so narrow that it is called Io, which is called Present, which is called Display. The villager did not know the globe and did not travel either with Erasmus or with Ryanair or with a smartphone. But he knew more worlds, more people, more nature, more life, more story. He was coming down from the house, he greeted a hundred people and stopped to talk to ten, he knew the countryside, its fruits and its animals, not just the domestic and humanized ones; he read history books, he knew more generations than his own, he hung out with his grandparents and even talked to them, he let them tell, also out of respect for the serious age. He was more familiar with death, with the afterlife, with religion. In short, he inhabited multiple worlds. They took your past away from you, the future, transcendence and a slice of interiority that we primitives called soul. And all this happens not only on a psychological level but also on a training level, in study, of knowledge. In the beginning was the death of God and the consequent end of religion. What followed surprisingly was not the development of thought and philosophy, as the enlightened opponents of the obscurantist faiths had announced, but the defeat of thought, the end of philosophy itself and its marginal rebirth in the micranous guise of "human sciences" or rather of humanities. And not only that. Long into current life, in schools and universities there is a progressive disappearance of history, both as memory and as study and historiography. It is a form of collective oblivion that rhymes with the removal of the past, of memories in the personal sphere. A kind of lobotomy. I could go on and tell you about the decline of politics; or the end of the nations, of natural or traditional families, and more.
Then I'll come back to you, boy born in 2000, and I see you alone and lost in the ocean of the web and technology, on your raft in display form, unmoored from everything and I realize that you don't live - as the media opinion factories had made me think- in a boundless and rich world; you are not a global navigator, but at most you are shipwrecked on a desert island, interconnected to the world but uninhabited by real life, of history, of nature, of thought, of faith, of culture. And then I see you as more provincial than the provincials of the past, closed in a tiny world, much smaller than the Little World, lively and magical by Guareschi, Peppone and Don Camillo. And I understand your fragility and your intolerance, the fear of losing yourself in the fluctuation of aimless wandering, without fixed points, legacy and prospects, without memory or future, lost in the present, drowned in the moment. But I don't blame you for this, in fact I consider you a victim; you have no terms of comparison, live in the absolute present, they told you that your superiority over previous generations was based precisely on your estrangement from the past and tradition, on liberation from every root and every boundary. If anything, the responsibility is ours, of whoever made you find this global cockpit, resetting any legacy or provenance.
But that doesn't mean I pity you and consider you lost; indeed this absolute virginity of history of yours, of thought, of faith, of community can in turn become an opportunity for extraordinary discoveries. Discover those denied worlds, the courage to remember and hope, cultivate nostalgia for the future, approach those forbidden continents with the amazement of a newborn child, prohibited, which are called history, philosophy, wedding ring, until, thought, politics. You will make a sensational discovery. You will understand that the world was not born with you and does not end with you and is not resolved here and now. It's fantastic, lad, and what's more, it's real. Try to look for what we couldn't give you. Give us this humiliation or this satisfaction. Get there on your own. We dreamed of conquering the moon and the planets. You try to conquer the earth, of heaven and life.
MV, Panorama n.17 2019
source – http://www.marcelloveneziani.com/articoli/lettera-a-un-ragazzo-della-classe-duemila/