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Waiting for Lea to finish her shopping I strolled over to the monument to the victims of the Bologna railway station bombing in 1980 and was struck by how very many people in their early twenties had died.
I imagined them crowding the waiting room, where the bomb was planted. There would have been backpacks, books. Boyfriends, girlfriends, friends all heading somewhere – the future still ill-defined but full of possibility…
I imagined them crowding the waiting room, where the bomb was planted. There would have been backpacks, books. Boyfriends, girlfriends, friends all heading somewhere – the future still ill-defined but full of possibility…
I thought of all the love that had been poured into them by their parents. The quiet, unconditional love and hope and faith over 20, 21, 22, 23 years they would never begin to understand, or not until they too became parents…
All of that ended by their killers, youngsters themselves, decoupled from humanity by nothing more than an idea – in this case a fascist pipe dream – and controlled, it is said, by people who remain at large today, or at least were never apprehended.
A parents’ love, I thought, must be the apogee of humanity, indeed of all animal life (because animals can certainly love). Forget Romeo and Juliet – this must be closest to actual holiness, albeit largely unremarked upon because it is so damn commonplace, taken for granted. How many parents would sacrifice their lives for their children, as Jesus is said to for us?
The killers’ act of destruction was the opposite of love, the opposite of holy. And if love, even in its mildest form, empathy, is absent, then what’s left? Nothing. A void. But one should not flatter them with nihilism – they had their meaning right enough, even if they misunderstood it as they admired their vainglorious reflections in the looking glass.
They sold their souls for the sense that they were somehow superior to their victims – above the ordinary, humble holiness they embodied – when in fact their act made them infinitely, infinitely less so.
And that, I thought, turning away to see Lea coming toward me across Maggiore, was all you needed to know.
Categories:
spirituality
,
humanity
,
compassion
,
worth
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