Pasteurized milk

Calm sea, the water warm, the sun shining: it's time to swim. After a few strokes, I touch a piece of white plastic. I get angry. The usual idiots throwing things overboard. Then I look at it: there is something written in Arabic and English: Pasteurized milk.

Perhaps it was thrown overboard from a ship, but the doubt it was on board of any boat of immigrants seems plausible.

In any case, I think of what continues to happen a few dozen miles off, to children, women and men balancing on a boat, suspended on hundreds of meters of water.

How many of them are dead, how many bear the wounds of what they have seen and lived before, during and after the crossing. And how many more will die...

Yes, they are "illegal", and it is right that immigration is a "phenomenon to be regulated within the law".

But what a pity, for them and for us, to see our politicians taking advantage of the Italian's need for security by affecting poor people that come from theatres of war or from extremely poor countries; what a pity to hear the European Commissioners false statements that Europe is "doing everything possible"; what a pity to see an attorney forced by law to investigate five poor shipwrecked Eritreans, veterans of war and unimaginable horrors, for the crime of illegal immigration.

What a pity, at last, to see my people slowly sliding from the option for what is moral, to the option for what is legal.

I really think that the two options not always coincide...

Bebè Aido

A few months ago the Spanish minister Bibiana Aido said that a fetus of 12 weeks is a living being, but not a human being, having the second definition no scientific evidence.

It would be like saying that a fetus of 12 weeks can sometimes develop a man, sometimes a sheep. That perhaps would have a scientific basis, in minister Aido's mind.

A group of professionals (doctors, nurses, psychologists, experts in law) then developed an interesting initiative: the Bebè Aido.

The initiative consists of the exact reproduction of a fetus of twelve weeks that sucks his thumb, in order to make people see how human looks the "living, but not human being" .

What a scandal!

A very angry spokesman of the Spanish Socialist Party said that the initiative is a "serious insult to democracy."

In short, everything is permitted, in this Europe which burns more and more into a delirious fever probably never known before.

Only one thing is taboo, and therefore is considered a very serious and intolerable offense: seeing things as they are.

In other words, and tragically, insight into reality has become a taboo.

But insight into reality would mean to recover from insanity.

My sea

Behind the fence there are ruins of the archaeological park of Kaukana, vestiges of a settlement dating from the third century BC, then commercial port of some importance in Roman and Byzantine ages, until its destruction by the Saracens.

Adjacent to the lighthouse, there is the home of famous "Commissario Montalbano".

This is "my" sea, where I grew up, summer after summer.

Ready? Let's weigh anchor!

Am I good enough with my English to start this journey? Will I be able to say what I really want to say? How many errors will make my readers laugh?

I really don't know, but when something goes around into my mind and keeps going for weeks, I think there are two choices: obsessive compulsive disorder, or this is something you have to do.

I don't like the first choice, so...