Liberal no. 39/1999
Dear Mina,
during the tragic months of the war in Kosovo, my nine-year-old daughter also felt involved in the great solidarity action that was the Rainbow Mission. Provoked and moved by watching on TV children like her crying clinging to their mothers’ necks, she decided to give up her afternoon snacks for a month and wanted to donate the equivalent to relieve the suffering of those poor people. I know that many of his classmates also did the same. Now we know how it turned out. Fortunately, he did not hear the waste controversy. But if you asked me where your savings went, what should I tell you?
Marina F., Viadana
Dear Marina,
Yet another chronicle of ordinary madness from the land of Bingo Bongo. In order to urge Italians to support a major humanitarian action, the popes of secular thought were mobilized, knockout commercials were packaged, and current account numbers were more repeated than the sequences of Superenalotto numbers. Food collections at supermarkets, postal bulletins attached to newspapers, in a nationwide contest that re-enacted the myth of the good Italian who is sensitive to the needs of those who suffer. The noble race for solidarity could not be shirked. Everything was done to make those who shrugged or changed the channel, those who cynically raised questions about how the funds raised would be handled, those who ultimately did not want or could not send anything, feel like human crap.
It was almost to be expected, this yet another late summer scandal. When has a public initiative ever gone smoothly, respecting the noble intentions of those who had joined it, animated only by the sincere desire to lend a brother a helping hand? Choose any issue you like from the endless wretchedness that delights the landscape of this land blessed by God and gutted by men. One will hear proclamations, intentions and beautiful strategies. Big flags around which to rally popular sentiments. Triumphal announcements, miraculous recipes devised by our rulers who claim that they are about to usher us into the ultimate Eden and that their foresight has eliminated any possibility of error. But the big flags only serve to restore the good looks of those who wave them.
Our European partners know something about this. Partners in spite of themselves, for they miss no opportunity to brand this country that would like to be normal but has made anomaly its irredeemable law. They are wrong to always portray us as rufflers and procrastinators, inconclusive and brawlers. We are such poor people, such buffoons.
All is well in the land of Bingo Bongo, as if it were normal for any Italian family to let what they have procured, perhaps with sacrifices, rot. As if waste is the obvious logic. We heard croaking that “the Rainbow Mission was a great success for Italy, for all the institutions, but especially for the Italian people who showed all their solidarity.” And indeed 130 billion from private citizens is a lot of money. But, after children, the unemployed, and retirees sacrificed themselves for a noble cause, wasn’t it worthwhile to make the best arrangements for their legitimate desire to participate in the solidarity race to succeed?
It is obvious that there will never be a person in charge who will tell us why no medicines left the port of Bari, and why rusks, antibiotics, powdered milk and vitamin supplements rotted under the Puglia sun.
In the country of Bingo Bongo it would be too much to ask for normality. But I also do not accept being told about “screening containers for the physiological limit of leaks and failures.” What needs to be respected is not the physiological parameters, set by who knows who and masking only guilty inefficiencies, but the sincere emotion of children like your daughter and the civic participation of those who have deprived themselves of theirs to be of some help in the tragic affair in Kosovo.
Everything is normal in the land of Bingo Bongo. As normal as the speculation of those who will profit from the operation of storing and salvaging the spoiled goods. As normal as the controversies that are our bread and butter. As normal as our dignity left to rot under the sun, along with the 904 containers on the port of Bari.
