The first news about a new virus appears. The news causes alarm. The alarm enlarges the headlines, which sharpens the alarm. Bags fall. The international activity is altered. The virus monopolizes the media. Chronicles and articles that relativize the danger are disseminated. Other pieces rebaptize relativization. The networks, where irrelevant garbage and the most influential garbage on the planet coexist (the Trump account on Twitter, for example), become inflamed. The number of infections and fatalities is updated minute by minute. Mistakes, quarantines, useful precautions and absurdities are multiplied. Some great events are suspended and others are maintained. Humanity remains in suspense.
We still don't know how the matter will end. The virus may be eradicated. Or maybe not, and we will have to live with a new type of flu. Perhaps a little more harmful than the traditional one, surely much less lethal than the so-called "Spanish flu", a virus that broke out in 1918, killed about 40 million people and disappeared (due to uncertain causes) in 1920.
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Yes we know something with absolute certainty: the alarm will pass. Whatever happens. There is no news or tragedy that can stand the test of time. Even the most heinous is forgotten or assimilated. A tragedy like AIDS, at the time much more dangerous than the coronavirus, did not involve border closures or public precautions. At first it was called "gay cancer", and I remember very well that in the newsrooms of the time it was ironic about the matter. It was a problem of "them." A review of the newspaper archives is both depressing and stimulating: it seems that we are no longer as idiots as before, at least in sexual matters.
But there are immutable things. Like the perishable essence of alarms, limited reserves of compassion and the ease with which we minimize a tragedy when it affects "them", not "us." As regards the information and the mood of that abstract thing we call "public opinion," death has a very specific way of employment.
I do not think we have forgotten the war in Syria, which lasts for nine years. By 2012 there were headlines about the risk of an extension of the conflict or, already put, about its transformation into a world war. We talked a lot about it. The fervor we dedicated to him declined until the shock wave reached us, in the form of refugees and immigrants. Except for that, what happens in Syria has ceased to interest us.
However, the war is not over. And it maintains its international dimension. Russian aviation destroys these days Idlib, the last great stronghold of the opposition to Bachar el Asad, and the forces of the dictator prepare the last assault. Nearly one million people, according to the UN, seek refuge. On one side the regime's troops close their way; on the other side they have the wall of Turkish troops, which, among other strategic objectives related to the Kurds, are ordered to prevent them from passing: Turkey has already received almost four million refugees from the conflict.
That is horror. But we are no longer interested. As always, there are dead people who count and dead people who don't. In fact, these people we considered long since amortized. What do they still suffer?
