We are pleased to receive and publish ---- Web Editorial Staff ---- On June 29th, in the late afternoon, a brawl broke out in Piazzetta Montesanto, in front of the Cumana and Funicular railway stations, escalating into chairs and helmets being thrown and a gunshot being fired into the air. Shortly thereafter, videos circulating on social media showed a hooded man crossing the square brandishing an AK-47. The rifle, equipped with a double magazine, was recovered by police from under a car parked nearby; in the following hours, three people were arrested. The incident provided the media and politicians with the usual pretext for a purely aesthetic and security-related condemnation, reducing reality to yet another crime fiction. The true political element, however, emerges from the background of those images: while some of those present fled toward the station, the pizzeria workers and bar patrons remained motionless, waiting for the gunman to pass. This impassivity is neither a code of silence nor mafia complicity. It is the application of a cold calculation of survival. Those who live within the same operational perimeter as the clans learn to deactivate the emotional response of panic because they know that, in certain circumstances, moving can be more dangerous than remaining still. The immobility of the alley thus becomes the last remaining means of protection for an honest majority that rejects violence, yet finds itself forced to submit to its rules in a state of total institutional isolation. The short circuit becomes dramatic when it is discovered that this immobility on the streets is the perfect synecdoche of the institutional immobility that crushes the territory. Those who live in this no-man's land experience a dual and mirrored alienation: on the one hand, the need to tolerate physical violence so as not to succumb; on the other, the forced economic immobility to which they are condemned by a policy that has replaced ordinary land-use planning with permanent emergency management. When the road floods, the state's response is reduced to a mathematical alternation between the extraordinary militarization of the territory, regularly revived just before elections, and the provision of fixed-term welfare benefits. This is the practice of an extractive economic system that progressively replaces productive investment and universal welfare with the management of their consequences, then demanding that legality be defended on the sidewalk by the civic-mindedness of individuals, transformed into the biological shield of an invisible trench. Amidst this lack of structural investment and this programmatic isolation, the state has progressively outsourced social cohesion policies to the industry of projects and short-term tenders. A segment of the third sector, often closely linked to segments of the film and fashion industries, cyclically descends into the back alleys, transforming marginality into accounting raw material: it serves to unlock European funding, fuel temporary projects, and, not infrequently, generate cultural prestige and reputational value for export. The problem, however, doesn't necessarily lie in the intentions of individual operators, but in the economic architecture of the system. Once the budgets are exhausted and the cameras are turned off, the project closes without having built a stable employment infrastructure in the area from which it extracted social value. If a young person born and raised in the neighborhood makes the monumental effort to study, train, and attempt to access those same cultural industries, they often find the doors barred, because access is often filtered through requirements that end up transforming into class barriers disguised as technical criteria: elite academic qualifications, exclusive training programs, and networks of relationships that those who start out in that alleyway are unlikely to possess. The result is that inclusivity is proclaimed through social-washing campaigns and training programs that too often end up exhausted by their symbolic function. In reality, however, stable positions continue to be filled predominantly by people from outside the area. The conclusion is the defense of a monopoly on speech and positions of power that prevents authentic testimony from becoming institutionalized, relegating those who manage to emancipate themselves to the role of folkloristic extras, useful above all to certify their own marginalization. This is why the media and political outrage over the Kalashnikov in Montesanto is revealed to be profoundly hypocritical and shortsighted.
The final point is that sociological mitigating factors should not be introduced to accountability that remains entirely individual. The goal is to broaden the indictment, because limiting the analysis to the armed wing means obscuring the institutional framework that enables the context in which that episode unfolds. A weapon of war is not born on the pavement: it crosses borders, ports, international traffic, and controls that clearly failed. Focusing exclusively on the last link in the chain is infinitely less costly than tackling the most difficult task: redistributing investments, building stable employment, and restoring productive capacity to the regions.Structural development requires time, continuity, and resources. An emergency, on the other hand, generates immediate consensus, legitimizes new extraordinary interventions, and fuels the ongoing narrative of the crisis. This is why the Kalashnikov in Montesanto ends up, paradoxically, serving all levels of the system: it allows politicians to invoke new security measures, fuels the demand for emergency planning, and provides the media with powerful images to sensationalize. In this assembly line of consensus, the immobility of the crowds on the streets and that of the institutions at the tables of power become two sides of the same coin. The only truly expendable entity remains the honest majority of the neighborhood, condemned first to suffer the violence of weapons and then the social exclusion of those who continue to present themselves as their saviors.
Serena Parascandolo
https://umanitanova.org/restare-immobili/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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