As many people, I can’t accept to see piddling anecdotes be treated with major subjects in the media and social networks without any hierarchy of importance. This isn’t a new phenomenon, but it’s accelerating.
Major progress is made every day by scholars, wonderful people achieve feats, masterpieces are published. And we barely talk about it.
We might be on the eve of a nuclear war, we poison the sea and our food ; one billion human beings fall asleep starving each evening, the future is dark for billions of people. And it is not spoken of much either.
The only topics of conversation are the silly tweets of a president and the unfortunate words of another, the cough of an adrift prime minister and quarrels between guests of a TV show.
All of this reminds me, backwards, of the sublime Roberto Benigni’s movie « Life is beautiful », in which a father, captive with his wife and very young son, in a concentration camp, and perfectly aware of the tragedy they’re living, makes the child believe that all of this is just a game, in order to protect him from fear and let him live his childhood. Thanks to the lucidity, the empathy and the sense of sacrifice of his father, the son survives. Not his father.
In reality, this is the exact opposite : it is the sons who take life seriously and the fathers who treat life like a game. It is the children who have got the sense of responsibility and the parents who behave like temperamental and unconcerned kids.
According to the reflection of the noise given by the media and social networking, lots of adults nowadays indeed prefer not to see the reality of the world, and seek refuge in the piddling anecdotes and childish reactions show, in the slander or quirk criticism. They love to enjoy the vices of the mighty’s performance, as if to forget their own helplessness.
The enthusiasm for new technologies participate to this futility : we indeed only talk about those which fascinate or amuse, and not about those which really determinate people’s life : the so called GAFA cartel, that mostly produce entertainment, is much discussed, whereas the cartel of the main firms producing fertilizer and pesticides (Bayer, Dow, Dupont, Monsanto and Syngenta), are not discussed at all when they appropriate living things more and more everyday.
Picture the same situation in war circumstances : the father might have survived for some time. The son certainly not.
The youngest, they are aware of that. Have you noticed how children are serious today ? They are guessing which world will be left to them. They silently curse the unconsciousness of their elders. And if the occasion is given to them one day, if they don’t die from the parents childishness, they will take revenge.
It is urgent for adults to behave like grown-up persons, that is recover the sense of the tragedy, of the brevity of life, its importance and its beauty ; that is allow future generations to live a carefree childhood ; that is to remind that each generation mission is to transmit the world to the next generation in better condition than the one in which it received it.
