We are many in remembering how that day began, and what each one did next or planned to do, depending on the part of the world where the news of what happened on September 11, 2001 reached us. No one who saw it in time real that day has forgotten the impact of the second plane, the smoking towers, the women and men jumping into the void so as not to burn; the pain of the sudden death of 3,000 people contained in the few hours of a soft American morning. The feeling of dread was thus superior, that day, to that which we felt in the first phase of expansion of something alien and still undefined; something that could kill but with exotic and picturesque edges: an oriental flea market, some animals with a rare good face, the strange name that was soon given to evil, between the novel (the corona virus, no more and no less) and the aerospace (the Covid-19). The 9/11 attack started a terrorist device that soon affected Spain and spread endlessly in many countries, with different religious revenge programs. From the beginning, that and this current tragedy have had similarities: the variable count of their victims, the false stories born of political interest or economic profit. But there is a capital difference between the two, the one that opposes the fortuitous plague to the deliberate slaughter with a “guarantee of meaning”, as Roberto Calasso calls it writing about jihadism in his book The nameless news .
It will not be easy for there to be a precise day or a single image, in our future memory of survivors, to signal the end of this pandemic. His insignificant coincidence, his hateless unconsciousness do not alleviate the hecatomb, but take away his will to harm. The bacteria do not follow doctrines. Hence the hope that the good of science will neutralize it. Its end will be our beginning.
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