As I write these words, I can hear the rain beating on my room’s windows. Looking outside, all I can see is the gray sky, and water pouring down. It is the third day in a row that Milan has not gotten to see the sun, and according to weather forecasts, it is not going to be the last.
Personally, I have always found rainy weather soothing and inspiring for many reasons, and it has at least two traits that I would like to start from to introduce this week’s story.
First, rain is temporary but never-ending: rain is always preceded and followed by the sun, no matter how long that takes, but it will always return sooner or later. Second, it is unavoidable: when it rains, it rains on everybody. You can take precautions to avoid getting wet, but you cannot altogether avoid being rained on.
Last Friday, in Florence and Pisa, two groups largely composed of underage high-school students were peacefully marching on the streets in a pro-Palestine demonstration asking for a peaceful resolution of the war between Hamas and Israel, which in Gaza alone has so far resulted into about 27 thousand dead. In circumstances that have yet to be ascertained, tens of demonstrators were vehemently beaten by police officers wearing riot gear. There is a quite gruesome video of one of the aggressions that went viral on social media and that I will leave here for those interested.
It is not the first time that an instance of police violence in Italy goes viral, and by now predicting the reactions of various political exponents from both sides of the spectrum is quite automatic.
On the right, the tendency is to always declare closeness and solidarity to law enforcement agents, no matter what they have done or how evident their guilt is, and to look for any little reason to attack the victims’ behavior and thus justify the agents’ violent reaction. On the left, the tendency is to request the investigation and suspension of the police officers, declare solidarity to the victims, and call for identification codes to be printed on the police officers’ riot gear so that it is possible to identify them and hold them accountable. This specific instance was no exception.
Political clichés aside, what came to my mind as I found myself reading the political sphere’s reaction to this story is that police violence is seemingly like the rain. We notice it temporarily when it goes viral and dies down a few days later. Yet, it is never-ending because when it happens, it is never the last time. No matter how much time passes and how many governments alternate in office, the story repeats: The G8 in Genova, Stefano Cucchi, Federico Aldrovandi, Carlo Giuliani, Piacenza, Santa Maria Capua Vetere, are just some of the instances.
It is not the only topic for which this kind of metaphor can be drawn: every time a shipwreck takes place in the Mediterranean and immigration becomes the hot topic of the week, every time a femicide takes place and everyone starts talking about violence against women, I think about how there is a level to which our society functions in cycles, exactly like the weather, a succession of events that at some point will repeat themselves and to which we will always react in the same way.
Then, I repress that thought because accepting it would imply that we as a society have no control over such topics. Maybe we indeed do not, but I am sure that we can take precautions much more effectively than we do now.
The first step to solving every problem is recognizing there is one. Italian President Sergio Mattarella did it on behalf of Italy this time around in a statement about the case of Pisa in which it is said that “the authority of the police force is not measured by truncheons but by its ability to ensure security while protecting, at the same time, the freedom to express opinions publicly. With kids, truncheons express failure“.
This time around, once again, we failed. Yet, as the saying goes, it cannot rain forever.
Raised in Rome by Bosnian parents, I try to use writing as a tool to decipher the world around me and all its complexities by taking different perspectives into consideration. In Bocconi, I am studying Politics and Policy Analysis.
