Bufala 2: destructive individualism
Watching the Report's edition on the Neapolitan environmental issues, I started to wonder about one thing. It's all understandable that there is no industry, people are poor, don't pay tax, public administration doesn't work and all that, but there is something else fundamentally wrong with a society where 1) someone will openly burn car tires to extract copper and 2) nobody will stop them. No wonder that the sheep are dying and the mozzarella is no good.
That thing that is missing, I think is the understanding that they all breathe the same air and their actions have a direct impact on the life of their neighbours and of themselves. I won't even start about the planet. I'm talking about the region. Mario gets his little bit of copper and his lunch. Alright, but the guy next door, living from agricultural products, will lose who knows how many lunches for illegal amounts of cancerogenous elements in his cheese. The region and the whole country gets a whole lot of Europe-wide bad publicity, products sell less and there is even less money to go around. It sounds simple enough, so how bad does it have to be to ignore?
If people look the other way when someone is dumping rubbish in a field in broad daylight, it's that simple to close their eyes to other atrocities going on every day. I think it's just that they don't care. If they fail to understand the basic idea of a community, it can only mean that everyone only thinks about themselves and their own gain or muddling through as best they can. It's so bad that nobody has time to think of the others, but this is the very thing stopping them from struggling out of the mess their in. They just get in deeper.
Italians are always described as a collective people. From this point of view the Neapolitans are just not.
Cleaning up Campania would be a great election promise these days. But I have no idea how long it will be and how bad it has to get for the things to change.
See for yourself: Report: Terra Bruciata (in Italian)
2 comments:
Well, this basically called capitalism, and with mafia we get mozzarella crises :) If you get payed for 30 years for buring toxic waste on your farmland, of course your milk will be contaminated. Until there is mafia - organized crime, if you prefer - in the pace ruling, there is almost nothing to be done.
I would agree, except I don't see how other capitalist + mafia regions in Italy don't have the same problems. They're not the cleanest of towns, but I do wonder why Napoli has the worst of it. The only solution is that the people don't care.
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