Today, 60 years ago

A former United States president up for re-election becomes the target of an assassination attempt; Russia indicates European capitals as potential targets after pushing for nuclear escalation in response to the West’s support of a free and democratic country invaded by Russian troops; the United States chooses to again deploy tactical missiles in Germany; nato rearms heavily; China and Russia carry out massive joint military exercises. If a man had gone into hibernation 60 years ago and woken up on Sunday, 14 July, he would probably have thought that he had been asleep for no more than a few weeks. He would have read this in the papers, news of a full-fledged cold war.

Instead we are in 2024, and the first thing that comes to mind is a bitter assertion: human beings never learn from history. They repeat the past, entangled in the same frameworks. Frameworks of war. Frameworks of death. And thus, conflicts, threatening declarations, democracies heavily tried by politics that turn debate into violent confrontation.

The second is an unsettling observation. We are so overwhelmed, or even worse, indifferent, that even the threat of an atomic war among the major powers seems normal to us; and yet, a few decades ago it would have hurled us into terror. The war in the heart of Europe and the conflict in Gaza, laden with destruction and death, also seem normal to us. Not even the chilling images of an unacceptable number of dead children — though one alone is unacceptable — seem to move us any longer.

What is happening? What is happening to us? Once, in the face of similar anguishing news, in the face of the danger of nuclear disaster, of which some people irresponsibly speak as if it were just one possibility among many, we would have probably mobilized en masse, filling squares around the world in opposition to this madness. Today instead, nothing. Everything is normal, as if it were simply a film about a distant past.

But does all of this not make us even a little afraid? Is it possible that the only person to feel the gravity of the moment, to see the risks being run with clarity and concern, is Pope Francis?

Gaetano Vallini