War and human misery

As the days go by, more and more reports share news and images that one never wishes to see, hear or read. The terror-stricken eyes of millions of refugees fleeing Ukraine again turns the spotlight to the brutality of conflict. Unspeakable atrocities that we so often prefer to ignore, particularly when they are being committed outside of our radar. We are vaguely aware of what is happening in Syria. Yet the UN considers the crisis that occurred there to be one of the greatest humanitarian disasters since World War II. For eleven years, millions of children have been living in daily terror that their homes and loved ones will be blown up by a bomb. The same goes for the children of Yemen, where poverty, violence and suffering have become the norm, as reported by UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund. Not to mention the ordeal of those who seek salvation by crossing the Mediterranean Sea on half-deflated rubber dinghies. But what the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve, as the motto goes. So the distance from many of these tragedies renders us comfortably distracted and even a little cowardly, let's admit it. This time, the situation is different. The conflict has broken out just a stone's throw from our home and no one can turn their heads away. The war is here, with all its evil and its disgrace. For example, we read that, less than a month after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there are some who are already speculating on the routes of the fleeing refugees. "The cost of travel has shamefully tripled and these people are selling everything to get away. They' re also selling their shoes," an Italian priest recently reported on social media. He is doing his best to bring elderly women and children fleeing the bombs into Italy. Alternatively, there are those who take advantage of people fleeing cities under siege to loot houses left empty in a hurry. In between bombs, they steal the computers from the children's bedrooms, the boys' sweaters and the wedding china. The images that have recently been published in newspapers and websites are a blow to the stomach. They depict a half-naked man with a swollen face tied with tape to a pole on a street in Irpin, a town near Kiev. He is unable to scream, reporters say, because he has a large potato stuck in his mouth. The scene speaks volumes about the anger of those who caught him in the act of stealing from the homes of displaced people. The government has evaporated and people are taking the law into their own hands, adding brutality to brutality. It's wrong to think that the looter is a hardened criminal who takes advantage of opportunities: it's often the neighbor, the father of the son's friend, or the grocer from whom you went grocery shopping until the day before. Common people who take advantage of the total lack of rules to turn into monsters without dignity. The spirit of surviving makes the reason cloudy. Is it war that brings out human misery? Perhaps. Or is it human nature itself that is miserable, as one colleague of mine who has a more contemptuous and pessimistic view (perhaps unfortunately more realistic) than I do argues. "Homo homini lupus," man is wolf to man, the Romans used to say to describe the state in which men fight each other to survive.