Italy - Believe, work, obey

finimondo

You must believe the words of propaganda, the TV and the press reporting the proclamations of ministers, the communications of executive directors, the declarations of officers.
You must obey the orders of authority, be they rumbled by a government or a businessman, by a bishop or a police chief.
You must (try to) work, that is to say to consume the days of your life in efforts to find money in order to go on. You can’t waste time with original thoughts, freedom taken without asking permission or old-fashioned parties.
There is nothing else you can do apart from ‘believing, obeying and working’; the rest is forbidden by the law. The same law that establishes how much you can drink, where you can eat, what you can say, whom you can love, how you can die and – above all – how you can live. Those who do not resign to an existence of genuflections are considered ‘socially dangerous’, people to be persecuted and repressed, no matter what they do. By now simple intentions are sufficient. To have one’s own ideas, to dare express them and try to put them into practice, all this is more than sufficient to become a target for those who only appreciate applause and consensus.
For these and other reasons investigations on ‘organized crime’, with or without ‘subversive aims’, are multiplying in Italy, with the intent to give a preventive lesson to those who do not want to submit to any party (be it democratic or whatever).
At the beginning of April it was the Bologna anarchists who ended up in prison, accused of protesting too loudly against militarism that imposes discipline and bombards and against racism that builds concentration camps. A month later (as the National Police Celebration was approaching, a yearly occasion for raids set up in order to celebrate themselves), it was the turn of dozens of university students in Florence – very much disrespectful of education reforms and more generally of government politics – to be inflicted the attention of the judiciary. Some ended up under house arrest, others have to report to the police station. In total there are about eighty people investigated by the Florence prosecution because they refused to bow in front of authority.
Who will be next?
It could be anyone. Someone who is no longer obfuscated by football tournaments and reality TV shows, no longer obsessed by social roles to achieve and family traditions to respect, no longer inured by repulsive government politicians and pathetic opposition politicians; someone who will no longer bear the indifference in front of wars and nuclear plants, concentration camps and exploitations, incinerators and high speed railway yards. And for this reason, in order to finally taste a life worthy of being lived, he or she will start shouting, blocking roads, daubing walls, sabotage the instruments that power uses to compel us all to believe, to obey and to work.