NO ONE IN, NO ONE OUT. THE FENCE OF IGNORANCE

Tempo di lettura: 9 minuti

There is no worse ignorant than those who find safe haven in their ignorance. Ignorance is a fence, a protection, made of certainties impervious to questioning, to the process of learning and evolution: one stands still and looks at the world exclusively through the fence.

No one enters, no one leaves.

Social dynamics change with changing times, changing technologies, changing knowledge, and therefore each era has its own means of spreading ignorance, its own strategies, its own languages, and this is necessary to keep in mind, when we hear that “never like now” or “in my time it didn’t happen,” when talking about functional illiteracy and ignorance. Ignorance and its spreading like a cancer, erecting itself as propaganda, has historically produced the worst monsters in human history, causing casualties and barbarism.

People who feed on fake news, hate speech, empty and mediocre sensationalism, are the ones who do not focus too much on details, even in the face of grotesque misinformation. Have you ever had someone point out to you that what they are quoting-or sharing on social media-is blatantly false, baseless news and hear you reply “maybe so, but I’ll share it just in case. You never know.” There, that’s how chaos arises.
To me, it reminds of the dynamic of what a dear aunt of mine – my sarcasm school as a bridge to freedom – used to call “the neighborhood committee,” that is, a few people in a given neighborhood context who were in charge of informing all about happenings that, with great care and unparalleled skills of camouflage, they followed from the balcony of their homes, hiding behind curtains, sitting in the yards in front of the front doors of houses, during church, at the grocery store or at the bar. The committee reporters would offer sensationalist incipits such as “but you know what the daughter of…” or “but you don’t know this!” to start a political grandstanding about values, rules, the world going to hell, delinquent youths and clueless parents, skirts too short and outings too long. I used to observe them in their different facets thanks to my aunt, who always had irony in her pocket and the right provocative attitude so that the committee could not run out of issues to address on the agenda, especially during the hot summer evenings, when people would meet outdoors carrying their chairs from home. Anyone, thanks to the grueling work of the committee, was not exempt* from having a label printed on them, even though none of the committee members had ever even heard their voices. No one asked, no one verified, no one found anything else to do, but they all knew how to label just fine, as if on an assembly line. Beyond my aunt’s irony, no one questioned the committee, because anyway “something good it was doing” – er… – that is, it manned the territory, and misdeeds hardly happened outside their supervision; moreover, we children were constantly under control, and this was the unspoken compromise that made everyone coexist in peace. I lived my childhood in the era when heroin was wreaking havoc on young people who lived their addiction on the fringes like lepers, who like ghosts had to pass through our lives without being too conspicuous or too troublesome, and their families were the subject of lessons on the crisis of values and parental incapacity. Indeed, they were going through “their” lives, the lives of those around me, because there was room in our lives for anyone who wanted to stop, and we did not peek at the world outside by whispering, but lived it by welcoming it.
Having grown up in a non-bigoted family environment, eating bread and civil rights, preserved me from all that false logorrheic respectability, for which everything outside the pattern of the outwardly ordered and approved traditional family was to be condemned and corrected.

These are the same precise dynamics that, brick by brick, bullshit by bullshit, have helped build the immense dung castle that is the propaganda of the radical and conservative right-wingers against reproductive rights, against women, against the LGBTQ+ community: AGAINST EVERYTHING AND EVERYBODY except themselves* who, in the name of defending that heteronormativity erected as a system, construct and justify every possible discrimination, defend the sanctity of the traditional family composed of mother-father-child, sexuality for reproductive purposes, color the world “blue for males and pink for females” who, “by nature” fill well-defined and different roles, have innate emotional, behavioral predispositions defining their abilities. The man is white, cisgender, heterosexual: below, in the hierarchical scale of which he is the proud apex, is everything else. For everything else, lower certainly, every possible discrimination. The battle for the elimination of all rights for those underneath is fought to the tune of mincing words, to appeal to that to all that part of public opinion that does not delve deeper, that stops at the sensationalistic incipit, that knows no empathy. A huge and boundless neighborhood committee, pointing its finger at anyone outside the fence of certainty, and desecrating that inviolable refuge.
It so happens that some defender of these inviolable values and fences, the Vatican in the forefront, invents a very dangerous “gender ideology” that would go to unhinge a natural order existing only in their minds and that would be inculcated in tender* and innocent children*: it happens that, taking advantage of their safe places, that is, the schools, some perverted* teachers make use of unclean creatures who are part of the “gay lobby” to induce poor souls to convert to lewd and immoral homosexuality. Here. In schools. During classes. Along come certain guys and girls who, after using a pendulum to hypnotize little boys and girls, induce them to “homosexualize,” against their will and force them to engage in outrageous, promiscuous behavior offensive to human dignity. And then certainly, after this witchcraft, little Maria will come home and tell mom and dad that when she grows up she wants to marry Giulia, and Paolo will say he is engaged to Lorenzo, and the world will go to hell, because no more children will be born, because we will become extinct or even be allowed to adopt, because there is no more respect for what nature has so clearly defined because … because “then marry your dog no?” but “hands off the children! Yes, hands off the children! Because God made us men and women, with definite roles and duties!” Inevitable, the evergreen “today they make it all up for attention, in my time such things were not seen!”, which remains a good statement for all seasons….

And while on the one hand you fight the advance of “gender theory” with spears and shields, on the other hand, sitting on the bench sipping mojitos, the one who “for me everyone can do what they want, I don’t understand why you are so pissed off, where is all the discrimination? Rather, let’s talk about work, expensive gasoline, my grandmother’s pension, my mother’s sciatica, grandfather’s hemorrhoids, these young people who don’t want to work….”
History teaches: all oppression has been built first through political consensus, then justified through lies, to be sustained by ignorance, and reinforced by carelessness.
“History teaches this, to those who not only study the succession of historical events, but have the tools to understand cause-and-effect mechanisms. And this should be the role of schools: to stimulate the ability to analyze, to understand that an action A, is followed by a reaction B. In order to be able to avoid the recurrence of catastrophic events, wars, exploitation, abuse”: these last are the words of a dear companion and friend who is an elementary school teacher: thanks to people like her I retain hope for the future, and I continue to nurture it. Thanks to conversations with people like her, I also endure conversations with those who only care about their immediate future.
Speaking of primary school, years ago one of those things happened that makes us touch discrimination, to the point of feeling by touch that it has precisely the consistency of dung. I was told about a mother who, through the elementary school parent chat, had told of a very serious thing: a sexologist and a psychologist had gone to her son’s class – second grade – to inculcate the idea that a prince can become a princess. A scandal ensued: the School Director was called to account for such an absurd occurrence, as it was clearly an incitement to “become” homosexual, and it was talked about in class as if it was normal. As chance would have it, I happened to be part of the association that, in agreement with the school, held readings with classes on nondiscrimination education. And holding these meetings, in the presence of the teacher, were two volunteers of the association, neither psychologists nor sexologists, properly trained, who introduced themselves only by their names, as they used to do, as is normally the case. None of the readings told about princes turned into princesses, more precisely they were books from the publishing house Settenove, a publishing house whose main purpose is to take care of the prevention of violence against women through publications for childhood and adolescence that aim to build non-discriminatory models of equal education. And in order to be able to prevent violence against women, it is necessary to educate about relationships, without stereotypes. What happens if an elementary school classroom reads fairy tales in which the princess saves the prince? Something disconcerting, to say the least, which is that a counter-narrative is provided: if the princess also saves the prince, then it is possible for women to face vicissitudes and difficulties exactly like men, and even be autonomous, not “protected.” Never! We cannot allow innocent little girls to grow up with the idea that they do not have to find a prince charming to protect them from adversity! The survival of the fairy tale of marriage, of the maternal instinct, of blue for boys and pink for girls, of the male astronaut and the female homemaker…what the hell!
It may be that a little boy or girl, when confronted with a parent’s inquiry about how this encounter unfolded, summarizes the story by saying that the roles he or she knew, because they were repeated to exhaustion in the fairy tales he or she heard from his or her first breath, were reversed. That fits.
What I found truly unacceptable and defamatory is the fact that this mother deliberately added false details — to incur the wrath of other parents lacking the faculty of discernment — namely that the two volunteers presented themselves as a sexologist and a psychologist, and cried scandal of homosexualization of the creatures. Such news goes around the world in a microsecond, and it goes to feed that bottomless pit of lies that has the only end result of damaging the lives of their own children/children. Underneath the house, I have for years heard kids using sexist, homophobic, discriminatory language, even in the trivial game of soccer, or while sitting and talking to each other: they do it loudly, and their parents can clearly hear. They can hear when, talking about their schoolmates, they call them whores because of the way they dress, or say what they would do to them, and what they would do to them has to do with rape. Above all, they use the figure of the prostitute to indicate a woman who does not deserve respect. But they use languages and attitudes that they have introjected. They did it when they were 7 or 8 years old, they do it now that they are 13 or 14. But woe to blasphemy, blasphemy no! Why? Because in the home they talk about faggots, whores, women who should be punished by rape and who had it coming to them because of how they dress and how they flaunt their freedom. But on Sundays we go to church, so blasphemy is not. So shouldn’t everyone’s future and freedom be secured, starting with when they can put their feet outside the house and spend time in a place of relationship with a colorful, dynamic and not rigidly imposed world? Maybe a little something can be passed on to that part of my generation that, despite seeing the world through the keyhole, has chosen to reproduce itself, and to reproduce a macho model of relationship, the real failure of this society. Maybe, we can bring in this colorful and vibrant world of freedom that is the world of human rights activism and they will realize that it is not bad to live their own lives and not the lives of others. Maybe…the neighborhood committee decides to spend time cultivating solidarity rather than unsolicited judgments.