As a journalist I need to read or listen to the latest news in the world as soon as I wake up. When those next to me sardonically ask me what the “good news” of the day is, I understand the irony. And more than irony is the realization that today in the world everything seems to be a disaster, especially of violence, but also of a crisis of values, the awakening of old fascism and the corruption of democracies.
Will we have to go back to the days of newspapers that only published good news that ended up failing? It’s not that either, but perhaps it is true that especially with the arrival of social networks and new news dissemination technologies, that innate itch for the catastrophic, for the negative versus the negative, is becoming more acute, and sometimes even scientifically. The positive. The more blood, the better. The more tragic the news, the more it sells.
However, perhaps we are making a mistake in believing that good news, news that expands the soul, examples of improvement, desires for peace and justice, no longer sell. This is beginning to seem true, since the major newspapers, which were being contaminated by social networks with their daily truculence, are beginning to return to positive, luminous, cultural information, which offers hope. People are beginning to get tired of so much violence and new psychological illnesses are growing in a frightening way.
Three days ago, the news of the 17-year-old boy who killed his father, his mother and his sister with his father’s gun, without repentance, shocked people in Brazil. In addition to confessing to the crime, he told the police impassively that he would repeat it if he could. Yes, one more crime, but most of the information dealt with details about the incident. without delving into the possible motivations. Only one newspaper recalled that the boy had been “adopted,” without delving into the real causes.
And that is one of the dangers of information in these times when certain types of violence are multiplying and the media cannot hide it. What is missing most of the time is an analysis that delves into the true reasons for this increase in violence, whether family or social, especially among adolescents and which falls so heavily against women. And whether it is true or not that especially among adolescents the main cause of violence is mobile phones that facilitate their access to games and scenes of violence.
According to psychologists and psychiatrists, what may be failing, however, is the lack of dialogue in schools and colleges between educators and family members for a better understanding of this upsurge in violence among young people. It is of little use to make known the facts without trying to delve into their causes, knowing that we are in a historical moment of transition. We do not know for sure where and for what, but that the homo sapiens is beset by the speed of transformation of social and personal life is undeniable. Just think about the confirmation of the new artificial intelligence (AI) gurus who imagine machines that intellectually surpass humans.
What perhaps we all lack in this change of era that we still do not know where it may lead us is the ability to understand the differences, the problems and the stakes to which the new generation that has not yet experienced the horrors of a world war, but which has to endure, without help, the new and unstoppable digital revolution with all its pros and cons.
Just as the world wars of the past left the wounds of the body and soul suffered on the battlefields open for years, it is possible that the new technological wars, which could also be as disastrous as conventional wars, leave open wounds that are difficult to heal. cure.
This small reflection on the increase in violence among adolescents driven by new technological wars that sometimes disrupt the physical and, above all, psychological balance of young people—which is so difficult for us to analyze—has made me remember the sad story of a journalist colleague when, before this newspaper was founded, I worked in the cultural section of the RAI, the powerful Italian television.
I was commissioned to prepare a series of reports on “the loneliness of modern man”, from that of the successful businessman to that of a prostitute who hid her profession from her family. In the team of six people who traveled through Italy in search of experiences of loneliness to film, there was an older journalist in charge of organizing the trips. The first day in Milan, at lunchtime in a restaurant, he asked me if he could eat alone at a separate table. He was extremely shy and seemed to hide some intimate and unspeakable problem.
Throughout the 10-day trip, he continued to eat at a table just for himself. Back in Rome I asked my director at the time if that colleague had any special problem. He told me that he didn’t know but that, for example, they never spoke with his only daughter with whom he lived in his house, only on the phone when he arrived at the television station.
I didn’t settle. He was a wonderful and helpful companion. One day I asked him bluntly but delicately why he wanted to be alone. He trusted me and told me his story: he was, although no one knew it, a survivor of the Nazi camp of Auschwitz, from which he managed to escape. He told me that one of the things that horrified him most in the concentration camp was always being together, without a minute of solitude or to relieve himself, and that since then he could not be in company. His happiness was loneliness. We managed to open a dialogue and I even got to know his daughter, with whom he only spoke on the phone.
That memory that is both tender and terrible at the same time comes to mind every time a new wave of violence devastates the world of adolescents, who mutilate or commit suicide without us worrying too much about knowing why. Without this work that should be multicultural, we will continue to report every day on the bloody tragedies perpetrated by young people, incapable of understanding the wounded folds of their soul. And there we do have a responsibility, those of us who exercise the job of informing society and analyzing why this river of young people, today, throughout the world, seems to frequently suffer the lashes of the incomprehension of what boils in their wounded souls even in flower.
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