By: Lia Contesso
Submitted: 2010-12-10 03:34:06 | Word Count: 522
Working with heavy loads, bricks, moving heavy things, manoeuvring potentially dangerous machineries, all this having no rights and having to escape from the law to keep the chance to remain in a country which promises equal dignity for everyone but ends up offering under the table jobs.
So, here’s a group of immigrates who, instead of manoeuvring the cranes to construct buildings, decided to use their machineries to protest: the crane is high, and it is a symbol of labour. Hence, instead of using the cranes to move heavy loads of concrete, the cranes stay still, and the workers were up there, waiting to be seen and hoping to be heard.
While the world becomes smaller and smaller thanks to the always bigger ease to move, some still want to “defend the territory”. But only theirs: they worry to keep Italy for Italians, but at the same time they claim the possibility to move from a State to another, and they cannot avoid, even only for a week during their holidays, bringing abroad their “Italian spirit”.
The immigrates who protested on the crane in Brescia didn’t ask for anything but regularity. Why, if they have an honest job, should they be clandestine? Why, if they don’t do anything wrong, should they be treated as if they were criminals?
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The only possible answer seems to be “because they are not Italians”, and it may seem an answer more suitable for the Middle Age than the XXI century. The fact of not be willing to accept small and big criminals to be part of the regular citizens of our country is comprehensible : we already have criminals enough, we can avoid welcoming those of other countries.
But why shouldn’t we accept honest people coming from other countries to work? And why, once they are arrived, should we oppose, stop and impede them? Why, once we saw that they want to work honestly, couldn’t we accept them as “workers” instead of pointing them out as “strangers”?
Maybe we forgot the time when we went around the world looking for a job and we were mistreated and discriminated only for being Italians...instead of getting even with those who are now in the situation of our fathers and grandfathers, we should know how difficult it is and avoid them the same difficulties and humiliations.
Do we want to behave like those who were battered in childhood and now beat their children or like those who, having been battered, knows how much it hurts and would never do it to someone else? We should know from our fathers’ stories what it means to live in the situation of those six immigrates who lived for two weeks on that crane, in that building site in Brescia.
From the top of the crane they asked to get the chance to build a future, not only houses; they don’t ask to have only rights: is it fair to give them only duties?
Author Resource:- This article was written by Lia Contesso, with support from mobile tower cranes.
