The relationship that there is between crime reporting and the health of a society is the same relationship that there is between the ideas of those who interpret and reality. If we take a step forward, however, from this interpretative journalistic pessimism and are not afraid of clichés, let us try to see what the crime news of the Italian summer tells us beyond the complexity of the facts themselves.
Putting together opposing murders, as we have already mentioned here, namely Sharon Verzeni and the family slaughtered in Paderno Dugnano by their 17-year-old son, it emerges that Evil, at least geopolitically, is not where you expect it. That is, the unsafe and often run-down metropolises at least in many neighborhoods, with lots of people, lots of stories, lots of crime, often organized crime. There where, in short, statistics speak of latent insecurity and where human relationships are also put under pressure by economic factors.
Instead, Evil is there, even in the Italian province, even in small communities that are generally quiet and unaccustomed to violence. The underlying theme is this: the society without more geographical and anthropological boundaries, that of the Net, tends to shape and spread cultural patterns and hierarchies of value or dis-value in a global sense. The evil of living, in short, has paradoxically become “universal.” Not that the Italian province has not generated terrible stories – Cogne, Novi Ligure above all, a child murdered by his mother and a mother and child murdered by the older daughter and her very young boyfriend. Something has changed in recent years, however; it is as if social and mental suffering no longer has no boundaries and no longer finds, in individual communities of reference, an outlet or help.
We have already talked, in Sharon’s case, about the killer’s mental illness, known but without any intervention; we have talked about the frightening incommunicability of bourgeois families. The signal to everyone, including the political world, is that something at the general level needs to be tweaked: more the person at the center, less selfishness, less businessism, less selfishness, less inner and outer loneliness. Perhaps.
The article Evil without borders comes from TheNewyorker.
