TO Perugia a 17-year-old young man was planning a massacre, like the one carried out 26 years ago by an American student at Columbine high school. TO Bergamo a 13 year old boy tried to kill his French teacher because he felt humiliated. TO Naples another seventeen-year-old stabbed a 14-year-old student in the school bathrooms. Crime news incidents that provided a Walter Veltroni the opportunity for a long article on Corriere della Serawith the intention of explaining the pain of the boys. The former secretary of PDwho has long become the main editorialist of the daily newspaper on Via Solferino, to understand how “alone and judged” today’s teenagers feel, has brought together Padua the representatives of six high schools and with them he began to discuss what he defined as anational emergency.
I agree with Veltroni on the fact that the youthful distressbut above all the violence of minors, is an alarming phenomenon. However, I don’t believe in the national question, because I understand that adolescent delinquency is not an Italian exclusive, but occurs in most of the so-called civilized countries. However, the issue is not whether the stabbings and – in general – the explosion of aggression are a product of our culture or something that is not contained within the borders of the country. The issue that seems most urgent to me is understanding the origins of the phenomenon, which has recently taken on worrying dimensions.
The pain of the kids and the complaints against society
Veltroni in his article he gave voice to the kids themselves and, among the causes listed, there are generic complaints against the school who doesn’t understand them, against a society that is too competitive, against life that goes too fast, against teachers who “don’t simulate democracy”, against the judgment of others, against war and digital seduction. A long list of vague reasons, lined up during a sort of 1968 assembly, where everyone was able to give vent to their thoughts. In practice, a sort of collective self-awareness session, which came after the suicide of two students.
«The institute representatives», he explained Veltroni«they decided to break the wall of silence, launching a public appeal to reflect on loneliness, on emotional fragilityon the sense of confusion that many young people experience every day without knowing how to deal with it.” For the former secretary of PD it was an act of civil courage, “a way of taking on board a common hardship and also an explicit invitation to commitment for all institutions: scholastic, municipal, regional and national”. In particular, I was struck by a phrase attributed to a boy: «We are sold models of life, but they are approved. We are denied the variety of the world. We should all have equal rights to be different from each other.”
Generational comparison and performance anxiety
I don’t know about you, but after reading the long “reportage” about the youth universe, which the former mayor of Rome and former director ofUnit defines a journey into the pain of kids, I asked myself the following things. But the previous generations, mine, that of Veltroni himself and people between the ages of forty and sixty, how did they manage to grow beyondperformance anxietythe competitive school, the teachers who don’t simulate democracy, the society that leaves you behind and the standardized life models that have been sold to them? How was it possible to overcome the shock of the wars in Vietnam and in Middle Eastthe invasion ofAfghanistan and the conflict in Yugoslavia? How did we manage to go through a season of terror and terrorism, with deaths in the streets and bombs on trains?
The family as a great absentee in the debate
The former Piddino seems to blame a rotten world, an insensitive society, the schoolto municipalities, regions, government, who do not realize the national emergency. But there’s only one thing he doesn’t talk about: the family. This social nucleus is the great absentee of the discourse. There are the social but not dad and mom who, in the sociological ruminations of the young people and of the former Democratic secretary, seem like ghosts. Stone guests who no one asks about their relationship with their children, nor whether they are aware of the states of mind that those kids who sleep in the next room go through.
We talk about educators, psychologists, principals: never about parents. Who, perhaps, are kept aside waiting to be replaced by social workers, as happened with the family in the woods. Or maybe, why not, soon the dialogue with father and mother could be entrusted to the digital assistant of ChatGpt. Maybe theArtificial intelligence he knows how to raise a child. Above all, he knows one simple thing, which is that, in order not to leave him alone, you have to stay by his side.
