COLLISIONI

Your name - Mariella

Age - 69

Your education - Degree in Psicology

Your job - Retired teacher

Birthplace - Alessandria (IT)

Actual location - Udine (IT)

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1- This pandemic forced the majority of us into living a situation none has ever experienced before, namely quarantine. What do you miss most  from the time before quarantine?

 

Not much. Maybe what I miss most is giving my son a hug, he's in quarantine in Trieste. Obviously I will be glad to see friends and relatives again, but I manage to live anyway, waiting for better times.

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2- First came the sanitary emergency and thereafter the economic one, are you more scared of catching the virus or of losing your job?

 

Being a retired lady, I fear a national crisis with losses for everyone, even if in this moment it could seem that we will not suffer any consequence. Reality is that the economic system is a set of related elements. I fear that the crisis will come to Italy, where my son works, and to Spain, where my daughter lives.

 

 

3- How do you spend or have you spent your time during quarantine? If this extraordinary situation has brought you to make drastic choices in your life, can you tell us briefly?

 

After the first days of adjustement, my husband and I have found a quiet balance ,spending our daily life between readings, prayers, chores, cooking, contacts with neighbours, relatives and friends through smartphone, care of our two cats.

 

 

4- During the first days of quarantine around the end of February and the beginning of March, on the web appeared some articles by major news organizations about a very specific subject and with titles such as: “Coronavirus frightens, climate does not. How takes form the perception of risk.”

Have you ever thought about it? Have you ever considered that the experience of this pandemic could be taken as a lesson on climate change?

 

I have constantly asserted that the climate change has never been taken seriously enough. As a Greenpeace supporter, I am quite informed about it and the dullness of the big financial and industrial powers upsets me. They are the same who denied the danger of the pandemic. I am afraid that the solidarity of the beginning will outlast when it comes to the single individuals , less on a worldwide scale. People are better than what the mass media show us and then what the politicians assume.

 

5- Pandemic has already brought severe changes in everyone's everyday life, and it will bring more and more. Did it unleash new doubts about your own future and/or the one of your family? Which ones?

 

My family will deal with the unexpected, putting into play our own resources, knowing that we can count on each other.  Future is always unknown. When I was 11 and I got the Spanish Flu, reaching a 40° temperature, I could have died, instead I am here. This should have a purpose. The same for all of us. There are a few doubts about the working future of my children, but, despite of COVID-19, the risks would have existed anyway, such as the chance to get through it.

 

6-The advanced capitalism in which we live made us believe that nothing could be stopped: the virus proved the contrary. Planet Earth basically had a month to breath free, all the activities or the majority of them had to cease: do you consider one or more of them, on balance, unnecessary? Which one of them would you like to see coming to a stop?

 

We should reconsider how to product energy and how to travel. Oil should be replaced by other less polluting resources. Without us, without our cars, Nature took a breath. I am afraid of the frantic reprise of commuting. Let's go back to slowness.

 

7- Some philosophers, sociologists, intellectuals hypothesize and/or hope that after this situation of quarantine and pandemic could happen a change in society, do you think it would be possible? (Explain us your answer)

 

I do not believe that there will be a change in society on a general level. I rather hope that the personal changes stay, for the ones who found out the solidarity of volounteers, the competence of the health care workers, the patience of the law enforcers facing unacceptable behaviours, the solace of praying, the company of children, the study with the family, the beauty of cooking together, the sorrow for the death of grandparents. If we remember all of this, we will be a better society.

 

8- Choose a picture that in your opinion depicts this historical period we are living in  and attach it to the answering e-mail.