If the rumors are confirmed that there is a video frame showing the co-owner of the premises of the Crans Montana massacre fleeing with the cash register in her hand at the height of the massacre, the horror felt for this terrible event will be amplified greatly.
But I invite the adult world to reflect that goes beyond this single case. Because in this eventuality – running away with money while children lose their lives – there is the decadent image of a society and a culture that has used the developmental age to make money, without any care for the protection of minors’ rights and without any assumption of responsibility towards their educational duties.
A series of frighteningly serious infractions have accumulated in the Swiss establishment: presence of more people than the number permitted by law, sale of alcohol to minors, closure of an emergency exit to prevent non-paying people from entering, use of devices that generate sparks, restriction of the escape staircase to increase the number of seats. None of these infractions happened by chance: everything contributed to increasing the takings. All this is in logical continuity with the scene which shows that, in the midst of a massacre, the adult’s concern remains with saving the proceeds, not the boys and girls who produced them.
We are the first generation of parents who must share their educational project with a society that is “against” us because when he thinks of our children, he thinks of the income they can generate and not of the educational needs that must be monitored and promoted, thought about and shared. Once upon a time the saying “It takes a village to raise a child” was true, but today “that village” seems inhabited by vampires and cannibals ready to suck the last drop of blood, regardless of the fact that it might kill that boy from whom you take everything away, without leaving him anything he needs to become great. Or even to stay alive.
In the image of the woman who runs away with the cash there is the metaphor of a liberal society that has put money at the center of its values. There is a Western world that protects the privileges of those who already have many, regardless of the suffering and damage caused to that (increasingly gigantic) subgroup of the population that instead of privileges has few or – sometimes – doesn’t even have one, has aspects of fragility and vulnerability that must be protected and not manipulated and exploited for economic purposes.
This reading of our life includes international policies centered on armaments and the proliferation of wars in the world. There are digital multinationals who have eaten the brains of our children, generating a “brain rot” which in the third millennium and with this level of scientific progress should have been the last thing to happen in the lives of those growing up.
If the rumors are confirmed, the work to be done in our minds and hearts as adults nIt must not be to despise “that woman”, but to completely review the socio-economic and cultural structure of a society that was not afraid to put its most precious asset (i.e. our children) on the sacrificial altar for unconditional adoration of the only god who rules the world today: the God of Money.
I really wish these words would become the starting point of a reflection on the adult, parental and educational world because it would be too easy to just think that “that woman” is a criminal. It’s true: he committed many crimes. But those crimes are the result – unfortunately – of a political, economic, social and cultural co-responsibility of which we are all part.
