The indecent confinement of our elders

Le Regard Libre N° 68 - Giovanni F. Ryffel (readers' letters)

Restrictive measures in retirement homes are a scandal of inhumanity. There are people who suffer from a lacerating solitude, torn as they are from their loved ones; the most mortifying depressions can only be cured by the contact and living presence of loved ones, and this is precisely what is now being restricted beyond all reasonable prudence; this results in an obvious injustice. There are even those in the terminal phase of life who cannot be properly accompanied by those who love them. Is it an effective fight against Covid to force them to die alone?

The purpose of medicine is to heal, not to prevent people from dying or becoming ill. Let cantonal doctors and governments think about healing. Let our conscience, our freedom, our responsibility - in a word, our heart - think of death. Faced with death, we must be able to be present: otherwise, why did the soldiers who, by defying it, freed us in the wars of the past fight? What's the point of the doctors who were on the front line in March, and before that in the regions where epidemics had been striking for decades? What's the point of working and earning money if you can't experience decisive moments in a human way? And that's what it's all about, being accompanied in the event of major illnesses, especially fatal ones!

Is it to keep a large number of cells alive that we are fighting the pandemic? Is this what life is all about? Is it just raw biological existence? No! Life is given to you by the presence of others, otherwise it's just the ability of a body to generate its own movement... a bit poor for a human. Even if the authorities believe that this is the only sufficient characteristic, does this mean that they see citizens in this way? Are we just bags of atoms? Individuals to be managed? A problem to be solved? Do you simply want to protect yourself from possible reprisals at the next election for not having managed the continuation of the pandemic like «everyone else» (which will ultimately mean with inhumanity)? Do you really find reasons to congratulate yourselves on your actions in measures that tear families apart, that annihilate psychologically weak people, that kill dignity in death?

I call on all those who understand the pain of this situation to react and not maintain the silence that surrounds us. Because we are fighting to heal and to make life worth living, not for a health DELIRE in which we persist as if we wanted to eradicate every last virus, but this is utopian, or worse, a delusion of immortality. It's more akin to a hygienist psychosis than to political management.

Politics is the art of living well together, not of survival, taught Aristotle. Survival belongs to the savage. Now, in retirement homes, we're all about raw, naked survival. Is this still good politics, or are we slipping back into savagery?

Organizational solutions can't and shouldn't be so humiliating for all those who have already proved their worth! What kind of understanding (or better: misunderstanding) of human beings could possibly lead to such choices? Only cold calculation makes such abominations possible. L’hybris sanitation. Only those who have not delved deeply into what it is to be human can be tempted to treat it with calculations and iron rules. The person who has never confronted the question of meaning in an adult way in his life is the one who doesn't understand imperfection. So he seeks perfection, but since it's unattainable, he creates pain all around him. Today, we can see what happens when an elite of technicians ignores the importance of the most vital philosophical questions. The result is injustice and needless suffering. That's why we must denounce them. Those who have the knowledge and the legal and economic power to help us out of this madness need to wake up and help.

And anyone who truly cares about the weakest should be able to question, even disagree or act against the spread of the virus of hygienist extremism that breaks the knees of the most basic human affects and the dignity we live for.

Giovanni F. Ryffel is a philosophy and Italian teacher at a Ticino high school. This letter was sent to us on October 24, 2020.

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