On caring

Once I was in the car with my mom -she was driving me to the train station to go to Verona- and she questioned me why I was so eager to go away, to travel around the world if the people are all the same everywhere. She was wrong, but she had a point.She was wrong because people are very different, culturally speaking. But she had the point because I was not even considering the option that I might face an overwhelming cultural clash and find some really hideous people.

Sometimes I loathe it in here. I feel oppressed and exhausted. Everything is apparently free and friendly, whereas it's just stressful and careless. People in London are so active. They read the book in the Tube, which is great. I mean, we complain that people in Italy people don't read enough, but does it mean they actually enjoy the book? Reading chapters by bits and patches during the 20-minute journey to the office... It's like the idea of having a prèt-à-manger lunch: ready made, grab and bite. It's not only lunch, it's the whole culture of speed. There's no actual time to do things not in a hurry, but in a relaxed, laid-back way.

People on the tube read the newspaper. Most of the time it's the (despised?) churnalism offered by free press pulp "Metro". Londoners are informed, they know what's going on around the world (with also the sort of self-entitled right and authority to criticize other countries' policies instead of looking thoroughly at their own yard!). But anyway, they know. I wonder: do they actually care? What's the point of being informed if they don't care?

Lindsey Hilsum, reporter for Channel 4 News, was guest at our international news lecture last week. She showed us a report on the drought in Kenya which is plaguing vast areas of the country. In the very first part of the report she put some footage of a dead elephant calf because she explained that such images would draw an Englishman's attention. British people are apparently concerned about cubs' health. I shivered.

Living in a big city makes you lose the perspective of the average human being. You lose the perception of "normality". Or paradoxically anything becomes "normal". You lose the ability of feeling stupor, marvel, curiosity, surprise, disgust, bewilderment. Evrything becomes routine: from the most obnoxious to the most splendid of things. All the extremes stretches in a line and everything morphes on the surface of that. Contradictions are no more reason for questioning, contrasts are taken as ordinary states of facts.

Coming from the countryside I still haven't lost my touch with the average human being, the contact with the very essence of being human. Otherwise I'll have to come to terms with the fact that I might come from another planet altogether (and I may be very willing to go back to my happy small universe at the end of this astonishing experience).

I still consider unjust and repellent the contrast between homeless people sleeping next to the Tube vent and the rich powerful businessmen and women that own expensive cars and villas in Southern France. The sight of a 10-year-old hoodie lighting up a cigarette while walking on the pavement alone still puzzles me and fills me with sad contempt. I still cannot understand the culture of unheathly food and binge daily drinking after work. I still cannot get how having a couple of drinks or assuming drugs while breast-feeding is even a contemplated possibility for a mother. What I assumed to be a natural motherly instinct -protecting your own child- can be a self-denial sacrifice that not all mothers are willing to make.