By Francesca Patanè

Summary of events: on February 2, 2007, during a soccer match between the Catania and Palermo teams, a riot erupted outside the stadium in Catania. Hooligans killed police officer Filippo Raciti. Soccer games were suspended throughout Italy for 10 days and many stadiums were closed to fans even when the regular games resumed.

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How many words were uttered during the past few days!  Too many; and who wishes to add anything? Too many words, and always the same. Pain, yes, pain and suffering. Bewilderment also.  Solutions.  Yes, the solutions. For soccer and for politics: give special regulatory powers to soccer Leagues? Or to police who provides stadium security? Or to both? And what about stadiums? Should they be locked down or open to fans during matches? And enough with talking about “objective responsibility” which hands over soccer societies to the ultras (organized fans). Or, perhaps, no: somebody will actually have to pay the fines.

And, then, the League championship. To suspend or not to suspend, this is the problem. If so much money goes around mourning becomes only Electra.

Words: too many and always the same. When there is a dead person, talking is fashionable. Newspapers, radio, TV shows, and then administrators, politicians, sports directors, parish priests, cardinals, common folks. Everybody has spoken about Filippo Raciti: regrets and proposals, conscience’s exams and solutions. Laudable; especially if actions will follow words (which actions? who knows?).

I want to speak too, all right, only once. From here (AteneoPalermitano.it), because, for me, it is a special place. Because, in spite of its name, this journal is not indifferent to world events.

I speak, and I don’t speak of a sick soccer: on February 2, in Catania, there were not fans that attempted to act as criminals, but criminals disguised as fans. Urban warfare, insane – and yet normal – crime news of a city like many others, a city without…

Without values, without family, without teachers. A city like many others of this sick and globalized world, where everything is disposable, where violence is synonymous of strength and prevarication is a power tool.  In every social environment, in every population stratum, in the squares that surround stadiums and in the offices of public administrations, where they do not throw rocks to kill you, but where they pulp your soul. And you remain silent and submissive.

Suffering; how much suffering. All the suffering of a world that is orphan of fathers and mothers. Of a world with many professors and not one maestro of life.

Turn the page? Of course. Restart from ground zero. Learn out-of-use and even ridiculous words: love, solidarity, participation, justice.  Begin at home, from a once-again well prepared table – a sharing moment more and more rare in every family of the world – and continue in school, up to the classrooms of a really renewed University.

Those criminals disguised as ultras, of different social extraction – among them also sons above any suspect of the well-to-do Catania – are the unedifying product of a school that does not exist, of a University that has abdicated all its duties.

Because, in those days of terrified pain, I didn’t see the University. Neither during those days nor after. Neither in Catania nor in other Italian cities. Neither at the funeral, to testify the willingness to change by those people who ought to educate about life, nor in the talk shows, to discuss alternative solutions capable of healing this sick and globalized world.

The School was not there. The University was not there: there was the city council, surrounded by other representatives of other cities’ councils, to defend a city from easy exploitations of political and “racist” tones, there was the soccer world to testify its willingness to change, there was even the Church, “to keep the distance” and in defense of its “patron Saint” (February 3 was Saint’ Agata’s day, Catania’s patron), so dangerously close, in the day of her celebration, to the day of violence and suffering. The University was not there.  The University is not there.

It is not there because none of the Sicilian and national Universities has felt the necessity of a public and official acknowledgement, of a meditation about its own mistakes, of a dutiful “mea culpa” for all that it could have done during all these years and it has not done.

The dinosaurs on the brink of extinction that crowd certain ivory towers of academia are and remain indifferent to everything that surrounds them, except when they need to defend the little, great privileges of the cast (race) to which they belong.  Then, the towers open up.  And the dinosaurs rush to the squares, to protest against the current minister, if his decrees pose a risk to their quiet intellectual ineptitude. Or they collude, with surprising efficiency, to fight their underground battles in defense of illegality.

Who knows whether Filippo Raciti – “educator” when he lived and perhaps also as dead, as his wife said in the day of the funeral – will succeed, in some way, to educate them. To educate the educators to educate: it seems a tongue twister, but it is not.

This is what needs to be done. This is what we all need to do, each one for his own part, for his own role. To educate without fear, because, when one arrives at the bottom, he can only climb up. To educate “without pity”, because evil must be extirpated from the root.

I am from Catania: one more reason for writing about all this. I am from Catania and I continue to be proud of her.

For the criminal events of this thousandth chronicle of “malasocietà” do not accuse Catania, occasional theater of a generalized malaise: we are all responsible, nobody is exempt, we all who have done nothing – or not enough – for a real change.

Let us begin immediately, and let us continue, when all the stage floodlights will be turned off again, and the usual, superficial normalcy will wrap around us with its deadly embrace.

Note: The English version of this article was first published by JUST Response on  March 7 2007. The original Italian version appeared shortly before in Ateneo Palermitano. Francesca Patanè was born in Catania, Sicily, and currently resides in  Palermo. She runs Ateneo Palermitano, a monthly periodical of university information which she founded in September 2001.

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