A couple of weeks ago, a tragedy shook the city of La Spezia. A tragedy that dominated the national media for a few days. ---- Politicians of all ranks, from the mayor to the minister, immediately and shamelessly seized upon it, once again using a horrific event as fuel for xenophobic hatred, for the politics of fear and repression with which they seek to discipline a society living in multiple crises (from climate change to ongoing wars), a society they fear could explode at any moment, challenging the patriarchal, capitalist, colonial order on which their political power is based.
Silence. This, instead, is what we felt we needed as a community living in the deeply militarized territory of La Spezia. Silence and space to catch your breath, to reflect, to think about the loved ones of the murdered boy and the terrible end awaiting the young man who committed violence, already locked up in a prison that will only teach him further violence and desperation.The group Restiamo Umani - Riconvertiamo SEAfuture has decided to publish a letter received, as it did with the letters received during the Acampada at the end of September and in the following months. We reproduce it below, and you can also read it on the website speziamolearmi.org/lettere
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Words of a silence
A boy died at school, killed by a classmate.
Beyond the family, crushed and shocked, the only ones who deeply understood him were the friends, peers, and teachers who gathered last night[January 16, 2026, editor's note]in Piazza Garibaldi for the only necessary and dignified gesture: to remain silent together, standing in the square, and thus express, first and foremost, the pain that defies words, the vertigo of a violent disappearance that is impossible to accept.
That silence is heavy; it must be borne collectively so that it doesn't crush everyone under the instinct to give up, to resign themselves to the defeat of their role as friends, educators, teachers, citizens. But it is also a silence filled with questions, a bare and ghostly square where chatter has no place, at least tonight, at least here.
Girls know perfectly well that tomorrow the security crackdown already underway will be directed, in vain, at all of them, with the aim of reassuring adults about the severity of the institutions and their relentless fight against crime and addiction.
A resounding effort made in front of the cameras, accompanied by a predictable media campaign punctuated by commercials for detergents and deployed against schools with the tools of repression and bans, responses that are already being announced and which are the only ones within the reach of a ruling class accustomed to the jargon of the barracks, which they continually confuse with schools.
From tomorrow, no one will remember the boy killed with a knife by a classmate, a very brief sequence of images of a stinging educational and civil defeat.
Families will not be comforted by metal detectors and the noses of dogs sniffing through kids' backpacks at the entrances to increasingly inadequate buildings where they are crammed in for six hours a day, where mornings and afternoons pass between four walls, where, as soon as a teacher enters the classroom with a book in hand, the echo of chatter about sexual and emotional education that isn't taught, about relationships whose time is interrupted by the bell and periodically marked by the essential assignment of behavior grades, fades away; where the circulars and debates on the correct and moderate use of social media, preached by addicted adults who insult each other daily in every available public space, finally appear for what they are: rubbish.
That teacher and those girls, starting tomorrow, will have to begin again and again the ancient toil of relationship, the only one worth getting up to go to school for, the only one capable of improving lives and burying forever the painful words, more dangerous than any knife, of a mayor who can think of nothing better, on this dark and freezing evening, than to point to "certain ethnic groups" as the reservoir of violence: a black lake that, together with that of racism, he doesn't even realize he's feeding.
https://umanitanova.org/le-parole-di-un-silenzio-la-spezia-la-morte-di-un-ragazzo/
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Link: (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #3-26 - The words of silence. La Spezia - the death of a young man (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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