“Words are stones, they can be bullets. We must know how to weigh the weight of words and above all to stop the wind of hatred that is truly atrocious. It feels palpable around us” (Camilleri).
It is the paradox, the one pictured by Camilleri, of an “immaterial and invisible palpable”, of a “quid” made of the same substance as what keeps us alive - the air we breathe - and which, however, can reach kill. Pushing fragile young people to decide to end their lives; abandoning women, children and adults adrift at the mercy of the waves; transforming freedom of speech into “freedom to kill”, to hurt, to offend and to accuse; responding with violence to the violence of the word, of prejudice, of the ghettoizing stereotype, of forced tolerance, of the suffered and agitated fear.
It is not just a matter of racial, xenophobic and ethnocentric hatred. It is a problem of incitement to hatred against the “difference”, which is characterized by the use of expressions that spread, incite, promote and support reductive and denigrating representations. To the point that the prevailing risk is hate habits, the addiction to the “banality of evil” and to injury. It is a question, then, on the risk of abandoning men and women to a cognitive, emotional and ethical training - collusive and intolerant, to a structuring of mental maps that shape into hate the style to connect the internal world and the external world.