A Glimpse of Truth

Back to school after Christmas break: new rules, old madness. Post-Christmas  on-line staff meetings  have reached unbelievable levels of senselessness this year. Here is a sheer example.

Principal (smiling): Welcome back to school. Can you hear me? Yes? Good. I have had some problems with my connection this morning……So, we are gathered here today to implement the new dispositions from the Ministry of Education which have just been dispatched……

Teacher WhatsApp chat:

(Maria) : Here is yet another scam! To be sure. Ready?😤

 ( Mick) : You bet!😤

Principal:  (keeps talking)….. the teaching activity will continue in presence, with the obligation to wear FFP2 type masks….

Teacher WhatsApp chat:

( Mick) : With 220.000 cases per day, in presence!!!😤

 (Susan) : They want us dead!😲

 (Maria) : Wear the mask and go to war, well, I mean, to work! 😆

Principal: (keeps talking ) …….yet, I am afraid  we have no such masks at the moment. We have piles of boxes full of chirurgical masks, actually, nobody wants to wear, but I am confident  FFp2 masks will be sent soon.

Mick: Soon, when?🤔

Principal ( a bit annoyed): I don’t know. Soon!

Mick : That means never.😤

Teacher WhatsApp chat:

(Marco): Good point, Mick!👏

 (Susan): So it is mandatory to wear masks we are not provided with!

 (Maria) : What did I tell you?

(Lory) : I have been wearing FFp2 masks since… ever, so  far nothing new .

(Marco) : If it is mandatory at work, I expect  my employer  to  provide for them.🤨

Pricipal: (still talking)“that is all………..Do you have any comment?”

Teachers (at unison) : Nope.😑

Principal: (hesitating) And…….there is the question  of  the recess. Starting from tomorrow students will be allowed to consume their  meals only  outside school. As a distance of at least two meters is to be  guaranteed……

Teacher WhatsApp chat:

(Maria) : Two meters?🙄

(Lory) : Can you figure the scene?

(Marco) : It may work only if we were provided with a whip too!!

(Mrs Tink) : We could make marks on the ground!

(Susan) : We could even play green light/red light like in Squid Game!🤪

(Mrs Tink ): I would like to be that doll! 🤣

(Mick) : A class a  thirty should require 150 square meters to keep such distance, multiplied by 26 makes……………3.900 square meters!😧

Principal (keeps talking): ………. the mask outdoors can  be  lowered only for the time strictly necessary to eat meals….

Mrs Tink: What if it rains?😒

Principal: In case of rain, students  will remain inside the school premises.  Of course, they won’t be allowed to have their meals, unless  the two meter  distance is  kept.

Teacher WhatsApp chat:

(Susan) : So now you need two meter distance to eat, after having  abolished school distancing. This is madness.

(Mick) : I will never be in class while they eat, for sure.

(Marco) : This is just ridiculous!😤

Principal (scanning the screen) Any questions?

Teachers ( at unison) Nope.😑

Principal: Yet.…we have studied  a way to save  recess………….😏

Teacher WhatsApp chat:

( Mick) : Have they? I can’t way a second more!🤨

 (Maria) : Are you ready for another chaotic procedure?

Principal: First of all, the rooms occupied by the students are to be carefully ventilated….

Teacher WhatsApp chat:

(Marco): nothing new, what have we been doing so far?

(Susan): there is more, for sure.

Principal (keeps talking) : ……………. student could  have  their  snacks  in turn….. in alternate rows,  and …. in each row………..every two desks . Of course, they will never  have to move from  the assigned station and they will be allowed to lower their masks  only for the time necessary to eat.

Mrs Tink: but as we have only 20 minute recess,15, actually, or less if you consider the time we need to have the rooms ventilated, they would have only 3 minutes to eat, more or less.😮

Principal: More, Mrs Tink,  as there are many of them quarantined  and follow classes from remote.

Mary: But they will come back from their quarantines sooner or later!

Teacher WhatsApp chat:

(Mrs Tink) : I don’t give a damn, I will let them starve .😈

(Susan)     : So will I. What have we become? Guardians? Cops? Janitors?

Principal (cutting short): ……talking about quarantines, I want to remind you that with two Covid cases in the same class, on-line teaching must be provided for those who have not had their booster dose yet . In  case more than  120 days have passed  since the vaccination cycle has been completed or virus recovery, the quarantine will last 10 days and it will be possible to come back to school only after being tested negative.

Mick: And what about the others?

Principal :  All the others will continue the  activities in presence wearing  FFp2 masks for 10 days . If the cases in the same class are three, on-line learning will be provided for ten days for the entire class.

Teacher WhatsApp chat:

(Mrs Tink) :More than 120, less than 120….I am lost!😵

 (Susan) : My head spins.😵‍💫

Mick: But what about the matter of privacy? We had been clearly told at the very beginning  of the school year that we were ABSOLUTELY forbidden to make enquires  in matter of vaccines, and now I am entitled to pry even  into the timing of their choices!😠

Principal: Things change!

Teacher WhatsApp chat (Mick): For worse!😠

Principal: One thing more….😇

Teacher WhatsApp chat:

(Susan): it’s not over yet!

(Maria): this is a nightmare!😲

Principal: Well, in case, you, dear teachers,  haven’t  had  your booster dose yet  and more than 5 months have passed since your last jab, if  you are quarantined (hesitates) …ehm… you  won’t be paid……ehm…. for the time you have to stay at home (coughs).

Mrs Tink: What?🤬 You mean that if a couple of these brats from one of my classes are infected, I  may end up quarantined  and unpaid, despite my booster dose has been scheduled for the end of the month,  because more than 5 months have passed?

Principal: It is the law.😑

Mrs Tink: it is the law of two days ago, nonetheless,  my Green Pass won’t expire before February.😠

Principal (smiling): Sorry I can’t hear you. There must be some problems with the line again. I see you want ask que…..que……..stions, but , really………. I can’t hear……………. you. (The image freezes. The principal vanishes).

Teacher WhatsApp chat:

(Susan) :This is outrageous!😤

  (Mick ) :This cannot be endured!😤

  (Maria) : This cannot be borne!😡

 (Mrs Tink )  : This …….ahhh…I see  there is a chance I might anticipate my jab on January 20^th   6:15 p.m.!

  (Susan) : It’s today!

 (Mrs Tink) : So, I have only 20 minutes…. Byeee!!!🥺🙋‍♀️

 After all the show……oopss…… school must go on.

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Kafka and the Travelling Doll

What is better that a good  story to make you feel in harmony  with the entire universe at least for a while? “Kafka and the travelling doll” is a beautiful story penned by Spanish writer Jordi Sierra I Fabra,  which, in a way,  throws a different light on Prague-born author Franz  Kafka (1883-1924). Kafka has always been pictured as a gloomy and pessimistic sort of  man, but Jordi Sierra  shows us his sensitive side narrating  an episode which  occurred to Kafka just a year before he died. It is not important to know whether it truly happened or not: it is just heart-warming.

At the age of 40, Franz Kafka, who never married and had no children, was walking through Steglitz Park in Berlin, when he met a little girl who was crying because she had lost her favorite doll. Kafka tried to help the little girl find the doll, but without success.

Kafka told her to meet him there the following day to continue the search. The next day, when they still hadn’t found the doll, Kafka gave the little girl a letter, which, he claimed, was written by the doll that said:

 “Please don’t cry. I went on a trip to see the world. I’ll write you about my adventures.”

That was the beginning of a story that continued until the end of Kafka’s life. During their meetings Kafka read the doll’s letters about her adventures and conversations that the little girl found adorable.

Finally, Kafka surprised the girl telling that the doll had returned to Berlin and handed it to her ( of course, he had bought a new one). But the girl was disappointed:

 “It doesn’t look like my doll at all!”

So, Kafka handed her another letter in which the doll had written:

“My travels have changed me.”

The little girl hugged the new doll and carried her happily home. A year later Kafka died. Many years later, the now adult child found a letter inside the doll. In the tiny letter signed by Kafka  there was written:

 “Everything you love will probably be lost, but eventually love will return in another way.”

Malaussène Scheme

Haven’t you ever wished to have a Benjamin Malaussène in your family or circle of friends? That is, somebody always willing to take all the blame, even if it is you who has been caught with your hands in the cookie jar? Well, in case you have never heard about him, Benjamin Malaussène, is the protagonist of Daniel Pennac’s  popular saga of crime thrillers, and he works as ……scapegoat. Actually, he is in Quality Control of  “the Store”, but de facto he is the person called upon to take the rap when customers come in with complaints. It works more or less like this: Malaussène manages to assume all the blame, confessing his guilt in such an affecting way that customers take pity on him, so, “the Store” doesn’t have pay for any refund, and everybody is happy.

Being the scapegoat is Benjami’s fate outside “the Store” too. Even if the situations he finds himself are caused by a series of interests and precise logics which have nothing to do with him, he ends up hopelessly guilty. This scheme, which I would like to call Malaussène scheme, is fun on books, but when you realize that what you call fiction is nothing but the reality, you start to look at it with a different eye. In short, the scheme in constituted by the following 3 main steps : 1) spotting a problem, 2) finding the scapegoat, that is, demonstrating that somebody/something else caused the problem, 3) using the scapegoat as means to go back to the status quo ante or simply to upset the status quo, as scapegoats can be used both ways. The field of application I want to use to demonstrate how this pattern works is the one dearest to me: school.  

Step 1: PROBLEM. Every year in Italy there is a learning assessment that we call INVALSI.  It is aimed at measuring the level of competence in Italian, Mathematics and English of different groups of students: in essence, it photographs the state of health of our school system.  Well, it seems the  Italian school system is far more than sick, it has a foot in the grave, actually. Just to give you an idea 44% of high school students do not reach satisfactory levels in Italian , 51% in Mathematics, 51% in English-reading and 63% in English-listening in 2020/21. The figures for Italian and Mathematics are shocking, as for English, well, everybody knows there are no good English teacher in Italy, so, no surprise.

Step 2: THE SCAPEGOAT.  If data were  taken seriously, after such an outcome new strategies would have been studied, and quickly, but, of course, effective strategies have a cost,  particularly, if we think that there have been no investments on the school for decades here. Furthermore, I wonder whom the strategist might be, as I detect no such mind capable of drawing the guidelines of the new school or somebody who is not  in the pay of political forces. As it was crystal clear that there was no intent for a change and , of course, no money on the table, a scapegoat was necessary to justify such a downfall.  It  was not so arduous to find one, but  quite the opposite, it was handed on a silver  platter.  Since these were the first tests after the outbreak of the pandemic, the designated scapegoat couldn’t but become what had characterized education in the years of Covid 19: on-line learning.

Step 3: THE  SCAPEGOAT  EFFECT. Hence, on-line learning has become the source of any ill regarding school and more. Is a student depressed? It’s because of on-line learning. Anorexia or bulimia? On-line learning. Demotivation and frustration? The same answer. Even when talking to parents, on-line learning has become the perfect justification to any behaviour and achievement below the expectation, thus demanding indulgence on my side. The consequence? On-line learning has been banned. We are about to go back to school with more than 200.000 Covid cases per day, in small classrooms with about 30 kids, with no ventilation system working and with the most absurd plan to follow in presence of  Covid cases in class. In short, 6 months of on-line learning in two years have caused a drastic drop in the levels of competence of Italian students and mined their psychological stability. Is it to be believed?

THE VARIABLE. Scapegoats cannot always work, as sometimes significant events, let’s call them variables, happen.  These variables contradict mainstream narration so manifestly that they can neither be overlooked nor hidden.  The fact in questions was the selection of magistrates held from July 12 to December 2 2021: out of 5,827 candidates only 88 passed, and most of them were “rejected” because of the written test. The writing skills of the aspiring magistrates were regarded poor, as there were not only technical but also grammatical deficiencies . We are talking about candidates who have a university degree and a master at least and, this is no small detail for what I want to demonstrate, they must have been in their early thirties, so they could not be the product of on-line learning, but rather the clear effect of years of policies made of cuts only and reforms at zero cost. For years all the methods concerning education have constantly converged to one main goal: inclusion. What’s wrong with inclusion, some of you may ask? Absolutely nothing, it  is a very daring objective, but the only way we have to include all, and avoid what today is considered a mortifying selection, is by lowering learning standards. There is no other way, no other miracles can be done, unless governments decide to invest on education.  Hence, in order to avoid depopulation, universities couldn’t but lower their learning standards too. And this is the result.

You may now object that all this talking didn’t but demonstrate that scapegoats are ineffective. Quite the contrary. In case of variables, strategies have only to be integrated a little: you overwhelm means of information with contrasting data, thus creating chaos and wait till the event is forgotten. And this is how we keep proceeding to nowhere.

Propaganda, Mysteries and Slip-ups

“Art. 36 .It is necessary to prevent direct or indirect discrimination against persons who are not vaccinated, for example, because of medical reasons, because they are not part of the target group for which the COVID -19 vaccine is currently administered or allowed, such as children, or because they have not yet had the opportunity or chose not to be vaccinated. Therefore, possession of a vaccination certificate, or the possession of a vaccination certificate indicating a COVID-19 vaccine, should not be a pre-condition for the exercise of the right to free movement or for the use of cross-border passenger transport services such as airlines, trains, coaches or ferries or any other means of transport. In addition, this Regulation cannot be interpreted as establishing a right or obligation to be vaccinated”( REGULATION (EU) 2021/953. 14 June 2021).

“The habit of thinking ill of someone/something is a sin, no doubt, but very often you guess it right” was of the most famous mottos of Giulio Andreotti, who was a shrewd protagonist of Italian politics for more than half a century. So, yes, I am a sinner because I thought ill, when I read the Italian translation of EU Digital COVID Certificate Regulation, published in the Official Journal of the EU, and I realized that the reference relating to the choice of not being vaccinated was missing. Yet, that part was not missing in the translations of the other EU countries and this makes me an awful sinner even more. It was just a slip-up, we were told. Nothing more.

Propaganda is a truth devoid of facts, some useful omission here and there, which makes the narrations of events slightly, conveniently different, but still remaining a truth. Words, images are chosen carefully, so that to impact on the irrational part of our brains, evoking fears or sometimes a sense of emergency. This new “emotional” truth is so effective that we are prone to accept it just the way it is. It does not mean to be discussed. A recent example? The narration of the  lockdown of the unvaccinated in Germany.

In Italy we have been bombed by all media for weeks and weeks on how effective the lockdown of the unvaccinated in Germany was, so effective, that after few weeks the rate of infected people had dropped drastically. So we were told. A miracle. No article actually explained in what this lockdown of the unvaccinated consisted. That was omitted. Everything was let to one’s imagination and my imagination associated the word lockdown to the very first lockdown, when queuing at supermarkets was one of the few chances to be in the open air, as we couldn’t even move further than 200 meters from home for a walk. Those were the days when at 6.00 p.m. we all gathered together to sing our frustration from our balconies, as if we were part of a propitiatory rite. This is what the word lockdown evokes to me, and many others have interpreted it the same way too, as more and more articles and comments started to claim to do as in Germany, that is, to lock all the rebels in their homes and throw the keys away. This is what we believed. For a while.

Germany is not that distant from here, so it has been inevitable in the long run to get reports which mined the authenticity of mainstream information. Different voices stated that in Germany the measures were similar to those adopted in Italy, although modulated in a different way, concretely in three levels, which overall offered more flexibility than the Italian system. Hence, there was no such lockdown for the unvaccinated. It had been proposed by parliamentarians in Austria, but rejected in Germany. Furthermore, the reported drop in the number of infected was incorrect and mostly due the a reduced number of tests.

At this point, whom should I have trusted? My thirst of truth brought me to disturb Aladin, who blogs at Lampmagician and lives in Germany (he was on vacationwhen I called him, actually), and he confirmed that such lockdown never existed there. This means that whatever we read should be subjected to intense investigation before being accepted as real, as today’s information is nothing but an endless ocean made of truths and lies, which are presented to us with same aura of credibility.

Hence, not only Italy and Germany adopt similar measures, but, and this is not a small detail, in Italy, the unvaccinated are not allowed to go to work, even if they make a test every other day. Vaccines are not mandatory, they say, only, you cannot work without the pass which proves you have had your two -and now three – doses. When I booked the booster jab, it clearly appeared on my screen, I was acting by my “free” choice, which was pretty annoying, as for teachers full vaccination has been mandatory since 15th December 2021. The article n°1 of our Constitution says that: “Italy is a democratic republic, founded on work”, but you may lose that Constitutional right if you refuse to be “voluntarily” vaccinated.

So, yes, I think ill and I am a sinner. Pretty soon the obligation of vaccination will be extended to all working categories, which could also be a good thing, I don’t mean to discuss vaccines here, but my fear lies in the fact that we have legitimized a method, that is, if you don’t do what it has been decided you lose your freedom and constitutional rights and, in my opinion, the word which better explains what’s going on here ends in –ism.