Editorial

Unprepared

Maria Carla Squeo

Exactly: we have been caught off guard. We are incapable of dealing with all the problems that have been plaguing Europe for a number of years now, the countless migrants reaching our shores and the hundreds, if not thousands of deaths at sea, which continue to fill us with helpless horror and disbelief.

We cannot be satisfied with how the EU is handling issues so delicate and extreme. The union is crumbling in front of our eyes, and Europe is no longer up to its rich, illustrious past. In front of such terrible, shameful scenes, we need to take the reins in our hands and change direction. There is no other solution, we cannot continue to stoop so low. It is a slow descent towards barbarization.

Our inability to act jointly and effectively highlights the distance existing with the common idea of Europe, united around its celebrated, founding values of tolerance and brotherhood. We are betraying an identity we conquered with so much toil and suffering, and are slowly forgetting what we were.

The failure of Europe must set us thinking, and we should realize that it is not the economy that defines a people. We seem to have lost our identity: we cannot consider ourselves a people unless we are capable of dealing with an emergency that demands our pity, respect, even love. Without these values, which originate from our ability to share and be open to our neighbours, we can admit ourselves defeated: inevitably our failure, our inability to act, will lead to our disappearance and cancel our history.

“Our greatest source of anguish – wrote Simone Weil – would be to disappear after proving our ineptitude”.

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