Original editorial in Italian

If Luigi Preiti was to commit suicide, hanging himself in his parents’ house cellar (he did not have his own house anymore), he would have been simply some additional figure in a trend growing week after week: that of the desperate people that leave to the extreme action the impossibility of securing enough income to carry on for themselves, crushed between a sense of personal failure and the anomy of a loneliness grown from a life all dedicated to work – while the dear ones slip away and it is not even possible to realize for what to strive for so much.

If he was to set himself on fire with gasoline, even in that same square in which he fired off his revolver, maybe he would have aroused a big outcry, and for one day and half everyone would have talked about him: media and politicians would have uttered mushy and hypocritical words of condolence for a “desperate” man, inviting Italians to come together mourning, perhaps even hinting to some necessity of self-criticism and reflection – inviting themselves to more sober conducts to set an example while Italians are belt-tightening. (subjective Italian conditions cannot let us hope yet for a “Tunisian-like” backlash).

But Luigi Preiti did not chose any of these alternatives and before putting an end to his life (if it is true that this was going to be the outcome – as mainstream websites inform us) he aimed to bring down some Minister… to unleash all of his rage, to give a sense to a such desperate action, to give an extreme message to many Italians which are in his same conditions. Any given political consideration about the inadequacy and wrongness of that action can be made but, humanely, it is difficult not being sympathetic in some way with Luigi. Any earnest poll would demonstrate that embarassing percentages would show an outburst of sympathy and compassion for that man. And perhaps it is worth to start saying aloud that this man shouldn’t be in jail (as no one should, and certainly not those over 90% behind bars for crimes against property, clandestine immigration or consumption of drugs) at all.     

We can be really happy of one thing: that Luigi Preiti failed to kill himself and that, by doing so, he gave a name to its own rage: “I wanted to kill politicians” he allegedly said to the carabinieri which blocked him after the shoot-out. It is difficult enough to picture him as “mentally unstable”, isn’t it Repubblica, Corriere, Stampa, Rai, Mediaset …? Then a Lombrosian depiction ensued: “a Calabrian”…which yet did not have any connection to the ‘ndrangheta (since when would have ‘ndrangheta thought and will ever though about hitting central institutions, it is enough for her to feast through peripheral ones!). A “poor lad who ruined himself with draw poker”…too bad that draw poker is today a mass social devastation for proletarians, as heroin was in the eighties (and we cannot rule out that that shit would not be coming back, it is enough to look at its new mass diffusion happening in Greece). Do the regime media know that in the neighbourhoods in which Luigi lived (in which the most of us live) the urban landscape is littered with “Compro Oro”, centers for machinized gambling and businesses that close one after another? No, they do not know because they live in the city centres, where these sad and miserable shows do not come to disfigure the landscape they gaze at.

The picture of today is that of smiling politicians that pat on each other’s back after the umpteenth and most scandalous spoils system ever recorded in history, while some shoots echo from outside and a bit of true reality starts to come in, even in their palaces…