About twenty years ago, my mother sponsored a little girl in Kenya called Chepy, helping her to complete her primary and secondary education. After our mother’s death, my brother and I continued to support her so she could carry on with her studies. Sadly, we received the news today that she has died; she suffered from sickle cell anaemia and, following a sudden illness, passed away in the ambulance whilst being taken to hospital.
The news filled me with great sadness and immense grief for such a beautiful, sweet and reserved 25-year-old girl, who had such a bright future ahead of her.
My first reaction was to want to understand. I felt the need to seek an ‘objective’ explanation, and I was reminded of the words of Eduardo De Filippo in one of his plays: in the end, we all die of death, without medical explanations ever fully unravelling the mystery of the event.
Faced with this event that obliterates all meaning in life, we seek explanations so as not to stare into the void that opens up before us.
This was followed by anger and helplessness. I immediately looked for someone to blame: perhaps she went to the clinic too late, the doctors didn’t realise straight away what was wrong with her, or the ambulance didn’t arrive quickly enough… And even then I saw once again how looking for someone to blame is just another way of escaping the drama of the event.
So I began to change my way of thinking, asking myself exactly what the meaning of existence was. What is the point of struggling, feeling frustrated, picking yourself up from the ground, hoping, loving, suffering, if then, all of a sudden, when you least expect it, you’re gone?
And that’s when a desire and a sort of certainty were born within me: that human life does, in fact, have a meaning, and that our entire inner life of consciousness cannot simply dissolve into absurdity when the body fails, but that it continues in other forms entirely unknown to me. So I said goodbye to Chepy, wishing her a wonderful journey towards infinity. For a moment, I experienced something profound.
Then I began to reflect on something else. We are surrounded by wars. Millions, even billions of euros are spent on wars. A single interceptor missile costs 1,500,000 dollars, whilst other missiles, no less expensive, can incinerate schools and kill children in an instant. I thought about how much is channelled into the arms industry, about the wealth accumulated in the hands of a few – people who can buy entire islands, as is currently happening, for example, in Albania.
And at the same time, people die over trivial matters. People die over trivial matters…
That’s when I realised the monstrosity of the system we live in. There is wealth and power being used for the purposes of domination, destruction and war, when we could be helping people to live better lives, building hospitals, training professionals, developing medicines to help people, and improving the quality of life.
Instead, everything is heading in a different direction.
A monstrosity so vast that we rarely grasp it, precisely because it is present at every moment, in every aspect of our society, politics and economy. Everything revolves around money, possession, personal interests, success, the expansion of one’s own power, nothingness…
A terrible monstrosity.
And so I realised just how important and necessary a true humanist revolution is – a non-violent revolution that truly places the human being, every human being, at the centre of political and social decisions. A revolution, because it is impossible to reform this system, as its roots lie in nonsense and inhumanity.
Everything else is merely justification, idle chatter, distractions designed to prevent us from seeing the monstrosity of this system which, in the final analysis, does not believe in the great value of human life, in the greatness of every human life.
Silo’s words have resonated within me: ‘…even the most “insignificant” person is, in terms of human quality, superior to any soulless individual placed at the pinnacle of this epochal juncture’.
I thank Chepy for helping me see things more deeply, and I feel close to her family. I want to remember her with her shy smile, with her slightly yellow eyes that sparkle as they look to the future. Her gaze is a promise for the future: a new world in which the human being will finally triumph, and the countless Chepys who will populate our blue planet will, at last, be able to smile in peace and look to the future with confidence and joy.
