When childhood ceases to be a refugeTo arrest a child under five years old. Yes. That's where we've gotten to.
Dystopias are no longer born from a writer afraid of a future where machines dominate everything, nor from feverish minds that imagined Terminator-style technological apocalypses. Today, the fear is simpler, more human, and for that very reason, more terrible: that the political class will turn off the tap of a good as basic as education, that childhood will cease to be a refuge and become suspicion.
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is no longer a warning: it's a mirror. Science fiction has been defeated by reality, which always finds crueler ways to surpass us. What is happening in the world?How deep do you have to fall to get here?
The pain of seeing this is not an abstract idea: it's a lump in the throat, a wound that doesn't bleed but burns. It's the feeling of witnessing something that shouldn't be possible in the 21st century. I don't usually speak openly in political terms. In the world we inhabit, raising your voice is exposing yourself, becoming a target, accepting the risk of being singled out. But there are exceptions to every rule, and today I've decided to break mine.
Because there are pains that do not accept silence.The pain of injustice can be stronger than prudence, stronger than fear, stronger than the habit of keeping rage in chains. The helplessness that overwhelmed me upon reading it is not personal: it is historical. We have returned—shamelessly, forgetfully—to the era when entire families were taken to concentration camps, to the inhumane logic of horrifying Nazi Germany.And the most disturbing thing isn't that it's happening. It's that it's starting to seem normal.