Palindromes

First they came to disparage philosophers and researchers who publicly criticized the validity of the reasons and date declared by the government to legitimate the bans and suspension of liberties. But mere mortals do not frequent speculative cloisters and scientific laboratories, and so very few have cared about them.
Then they came to strike off the doctors who doubted the anti-pandemic health protocols established by the government. But these doctors are not featured on television programs, they are not well known, and so very few have cared about them.
Then they came to blackmail the health workers who did not want to submit to the obligation of the vaccination. When this threat was made law, a small number of them refused to snap to attention, and so very few have cared about them.
Then they came to blackmail all workers without a green pass, which really isn’t hard to obtain: the workers only need to not be a flat-earther or a conspiracy theorist and to lend an arm, or at least pay a small sum every 48 hours to get their nose tortured, and so very few have cared about them.
Yesterday at dawn they came to search and submit to cautionary measures some anarchists guilty of openly considering the state an enemy to be destroyed and of taking part with their contents in the protests against the obligation of the green pass. The charge against them is almost embarassing in its speciousness and idiocy: instigation to violence through a clandestine newspaper. Leaving aside the detail that the newspaper in question is not at all clandestine, but then … does one truly think – just to give one simple example – that an attack against the forces of order is provoked by reading an article in an anarchist periodical, rather than by rage at the slaughter of a Stefano Cucchi of a Federico Aldrovandi, at the beating of immigrants, at the violence carried out against demonstrators, at the torture of Bolzaneto? But anarchist are just a few poor devils, and so very few have cared about them.
Today they came to pound on the doors of some opposers of the green pass, who were searched and indicted (by the anti-terrorism pool of the Milan Public Prosecutor’s Office) with the charge of “aggravated private violence” and “abusive attitudes” against some journalists, insulted during recent marches. Here again, we are faced with hyperbolic accusations formulated to justify improvised measures. But the no-green passers are plague-spreaders, as the mass media pounds out repeatedly, and so few have cared about them.
And tomorrow, for whom will they come tomorrow? And along this slope, in a short time, who will be left to protest? No one. Who will you care about?
The poet is right – there are no more songs to make the bear dance. The ointment of silence on the embers of a single word. Imagine the doubt, the rift of the night and spectral chill of the play that must determine the return of beings.