I’ll clear immediately, at the beginning: I am opposed to making black news a vehicle of social and political symbols. The less I like to take an episode and turn it into a whole thing. It is one of the rhetorical figures of the public speech of the media: the part for the whole, a synod, part of the fruitful family of the metonimies (the cause for the effect, to understand us).
But bullying is a social plague in Italy. Not only in Italy, of course. The last episode comes from Turin and dates back to the Halloween night, which we imported from America.
I mean, two guys and a girl have been spoiling a 15-year-old fragile all night. You want to know the details? I, within the limits of the laws, do not make discounts to the truth. Drawn in a trap house, deprived of the phone, shaved of hair and eyebrows, paved with a screwdriver and a tin, burned with a cigarette turned off on the ankle, insulted, spit, thrown into the river Dora without a shirt — and it is not certain Ferragosto. Everything, of course, resumed: the mouth of social media is already ready.
And maybe there is something even more serious. Parents denounced, and the pollutants already have an idea who the executioners are: people with backgrounds for violence and bullying. (But if you knew, why do they turn undisturbed? )
So, since we talk every day of these episodes — which often lead to dramas like suicide — what to do? The Minister of Education, Valditara, in a recent interview had given me stricter standards for bullies at school, especially if caught in flagrante. It’s already something.
Punishing proportionally to the crime and age is a deterrent of democracy, not an authoritarian drift. But then at the school you must add the family, and then society, and then the media, and then cultural models, and then political institutions. I mean, a complex machine that must fight a malaise.
I believe there has always been, of course: we must not shake the card between Freud and Einstein on the war to discover the destructiveness of the human being. But we are in the time of the web, its superficiality and its ferocious propagations.
And on the young and very young we can not give up the grip, letting them hurt each other, that they read the fragility of the other as an aggressive opportunity and not as a condition that requires help and affection. We are all responsible for this cruelty. Stop it means giving back a moral future to our boys.
Let’s try.
L’articolo The plague of bullying comes from IlNewyorkese.
