I am enraged
Have you not been listening to me? Has anybody been listening to the voices appealing to compassion, solidarity and the need for kindness? Has anybody have been fucking listening to me? I am enraged, this morning, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better, so I said to myself “go and write a rant: […]
Have you not been listening to me? Has anybody been listening to the voices appealing to compassion, solidarity and the need for kindness? Has anybody have been fucking listening to me?
I am enraged, this morning, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better, so I said to myself “go and write a rant: it always helps”. So this is it. This is a rant. It’s a political rant. Ha! I know.
I woke up this morning to a trending hashtag, launched by what’s supposed to be the political party I have been siding with and voting for since I had my rights. Well, actually it’s the moderate, catholic-sympathizing, wash-down version of the party I had been voting for, but it doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t even matter what the hashtag was.
What enraged me is the predominance, within that hashtag, of a side of things I haven’t been sharing with you guys. I thought you didn’t need to know and I am always for washing dirty clothes at home. I didn’t want to burden you. And, in all honesty, I feel shame towards it. You have such a nice picture of us, all singing from our balconies and home-made cooking like there’s no tomorrow, and I didn’t want to spoil it.
But this morning I need to talk to somebody about it.
So here it is.
We are a Country of racists assholes.
Ok. Not all of us, obviously.
Let me rephrase.
We have our good share of racists assholes.
There, that’s better.
No surprise here, you’ll tell me. You might have heard about one of our politicians, wanting to close down harbors and drown migrants. He’s one of the green guys.
I can get away with describing the green guys as a far-right-wing with socialists nuances (I don’t know if that description rings any bells). Often the green guys are really black guys, but that’s a different story.
I’m having trouble describing the yellow guys. They are a populist party who gained a large number of votes by promoting the idea of “change things”, generic things. We have a specific adjective, in Italian: “qualunquista”, where “qualunque” means anything and “-ista” is the suffix you put to substantivize the adjective. It could be something like “anything-goers”.
Now, the yellow guys are at the government, after a tryout with the green guys they formed a coalition with what remains of the left-wing, whom I might call the red guys.
Do you follow me so far?
Good.
Things are much more complicated than this, we have other kinds of guys roaming around all over the place, but let’s keep it simple: the yellow guys used to be at the government with the green guys and now they rule with the red guys.
Although I feel like I’m reading a piece from Don Camillo e Peppone. Those were good times. Except the Catholic Church is nowhere to be found, in this mess.
Now, the mayor of my city – Milan – is one of the red guys. So are the majors of Bergamo and Brescia. The major of Brescia is a former lawyer, the major of Bergamo is an architect, the major of Milan is a business economist and has been a top manager for, among other things, Pirelli. You might not know them, but Bergamo and Brescia are the two cities that have been hit by COVID-19 in the most tremendous of ways and in Milan, we’re catching up fast. Do you remember pictures of the army transporting coffins during the night? That was Bergamo. Which is, by the way, one of the most beautiful historical towns of northern Italy.
Bergamo, Brescia, and Milan are within the same region, Lombardia, to which you refer as Lombardy. Each region has a governor and the governor gets elected. The governor we have in Lombardy, and it gets me sick to refer to him as “our” governor, is one of the green guys, former major of Varese (another town around here), a lawyer. He’s the same guy you might have seen stumbling with the wrong kind of masks in a live-streamed video on Facebook right after one member of his staff was found positive. No, I’m not posting a picture. You Google it.
Now, hospitals and the whole sanitary system are not controlled by mayors: they are controlled by the governor of the region. It’s called a decentralized system and it’s often in use in Countries with a Federal System, such as Austria, Belgium, and Germany, but it’s also typical of Scandinavian Countries for which we seem to have a veneration, such as Denmark, Finland, and Sweden. We also share it with Spain. That is unless something changed since I checked.
Good? Bad? I don’t know. I don’t care. That’s not the point.
Last time we compiled a classification of the sanitary systems by region, in October 2019, Lombardy was ranking 5th, following Veneto, Toscana, Emilia-Romagna, and Piemonte. Basically the whole northern Italy is above the 210/250 points.
So, we have a couple of things happening now.
Does our sanitary system suck?
Everything needs to be made an instrument of politics, apparently.
Since Lombardy as a region is ruled by the green guys, and the sanitary system is controlled by the region, my own political party is actually trying to tell me that my own people are dying because the sanitary system is shitty. Which is clearly bullshit unless you give me different numbers than the ones I just provided.
Not only it’s bullshit, but it’s also an insult to all those doctors, nurses and technicians who are struggling every day within that very system. Those doctors made a class action, last week, but you should read what they’re saying before you instigate people to spit their hatred through stupid hashtags.
We would like to highlight in general how, in the face of an excellent intervention on the strengthening of intensive and semi-intensive therapies, made possible to a large extent by the commitment and sacrifice of doctors and other health professionals, it has become evident that there is a lack of strategies relating to territorial management.
Are we recklessly running around the place?
You might remember my praise of the spirit with which Milan responded to the first hours of the emergency, encompassed by the #Milandoesntstop slogan. That’s a statement I firmly stand by. I have been writing this since the very first hours: #Milandoesntstop never meant that we wanted to go around licking lamp-posts. It meant we recognized the need to fight twice as hard, to work our asses off through the crisis management phase. I didn’t stop. That’s the reason I am able to put food on the table today.
We’ve been crucified, because of it. We’ve had #stopMilan and similar movements.
This brings me to the very thing I didn’t want to talk to you about.
The green guys, before targeting immigrants, were born with a more domestic target in mind: they leveraged this idea that the North is working, the South is lazy and the Capital is leeching off both. The odd thing is that they never publicly recused this idea and still they gained lots of votes in Southern Italy too, during the last elections. It’s quite a well-spread thought, around here. My grandfather used to tell me: “Do whatever you want in life, but don’t end up marrying a terun” (vernacular expression to depict a guy from southern Italy). He was not joking. He was bound to be disappointed.
We’ve often had the North vs. South discussion.
Now, in Lombardy, we’re being accused of having such a high contagion rate because we roam around.
This is bullshit: both Apple and Google have been showing us mobility reports.
What’s worst, is being accused of having such a high contagion rate because we’re obsessed with this thing called work.
And this is bringing out a part of me that sounds dangerously similar to the green guys.
Do we deserve this?
I kept the fun for last.
The third thing I’ve been reading a lot with regards to Lombardy, particularly this morning, is that we deserve what’s happening. The main two reasons are the ones listed above: our Sanitary System sucks and this will teach us to work all the time. Also, there’s the karma argument. Apparently, we deserve it because we’ve been advocating for sovereignty (the green guys), whining about taxes (the green guys), recusing solidarity to immigrants and migrants (the green guys) and despising Southern Italy (still the green guys).
Ok.
Are you seriously telling me that my people deserve to die because we are the leading industrial region in Italy (366.541 € of Gross Domestic Product on a grand total of 1.680.523 € in 2017)? Are you telling me that we deserve to die because we have the highest rate of business travelers in Italy (38,4% of Italian business travelers in 2018 came from around here)? Are you telling me that we deserve to die because we are the second-most densely populated region in Italy (422 people/sqm)?
Now, as I keep saying, I’m not one of the green guys. I never voted for the green guys. My City doesn’t belong to the green guys.
I know you’re trying to target the green guys.
Still.
Fuck you.