As the game of my dream raises the stakes and my sacrfices show the others a mountain apparently too high to climb, people can’t hear me anymore in this country. They just don’t. I feel like a complete stranger in the middle of the night knocking on someone’s door struggling to convince him to open it, because my intentions are good and he can trust me: Hello is there anybody here? I’m speaking Italian, your same language-At least I thought, I hoped. I knock , I talk, I yell, I scream, but nothing. Apparently, they just don’t understand my words anymore. I know I can achieve my dream. Just trust me, open the door and I will show you. Yeah right. I’d better move on, or out here I risk to really get sick!
I always do what my heart and guts tells me to. Practically, I never listen to people. Stubborn? I prefer to say detemined. Straight like a train. I wouldn’t have made it this far otherwise. Yet, sometimes, it would be nice to go back to planet earth and live like a simple human being that would like to talk and act amidst the silence of agreement and support, rather than amidst the noise of a high and non-conscious barrier impeding all my closest affections to really hear me. I must say that my parents are very opened minded and supportive. They adore me and so my close friends. I’m lucky. Nevertheless, there’s something in them that at some point stops them from understanding my intentions until the very last word. It’s like if they had all the genes, like me, except for one, that one that makes them a different species from me and too far to listen to me anyway, despite my efforts. It’s like a Chinese making a declaration of love to someone from Island. The intentions are ideal, but the language definitely not.
The more time I spend in Italy and the more I feel I’m in a constant battle against everybody, against the country’s uncouscious mystification of reality.
Our main problem?
It’s not the economy, the bureaucracy, the tax system, the infrastructure, the mafia, the lack of real investments and R&D in every key field. No, they all don’t work. We know that already. It’s a fact that every international institution and agency would tell you with pages and pages of studies. You name it. OSCE, IMF, UN, World Bank, WTO, European Bank, EU. Even our politicians admit it in their usual “1 minute” TV segment of daily populism and qualunquism, great to gain a bunch of further protest votes against whatever government is in power. No that’s not it. These are all the effects we unconsciously adopt to mistyify reality. Because there’s no job and no real possibility of true success, as we reach a certain level, position and status, we acquire a mystified version of reality, a distorted “forma mentis”, a twisted mind set about our life: we stop dreaming, we stop aspiring, because it’s implicit and commonly accepted that you cannot possibly gain more than that. The average “lucky success” in Italy is to have a permanent job, or as we call it a “fixed place” (as legacy from the 50’s, from our grandparents’ fear to guarantee their son some security after WWII ) that can provide about 1800 euros per month, 30 paid days of vacation per year, about the same days of further “sick days” and a costant idea of how to get a new plasma TV set (with rates payment of course) and where to go on your next 15 days vacation in August. If you only dare to dream more than that, to aspire to something bigger, you’re not grounded, you’re a dreamer. In case you get excited, gaining momentum, well, get a grip, and slow down because as Jack Nicholson says “what if that’s as good as it gets”. We are satisfied with that little garden that we can afford to cultivate, so to maintain intact our acquired privileges, without having the guts to develop a real vision, a dream.
The Colosseum is our problem. The primary cause for us to mistify and mortify reality. Read the rest of this entry »
Horizon 