A people’s first law: mutual trust
Patience, unlike the law, cannot be extended by decree.
In the erratic memory of our enlightened politicos, a glimmer of sense is rarely glimpsed.
What is the rule no legislator has ever written, yet which holds everything up? Trust.
It resides in every gesture before it resides in the legal order: the value of a promise kept, as much as stepping aside for the neighbour climbing the stairs with shopping bags. It is our inheritance and, as such, can be squandered.
Buying a house means being certain you can return without fearing you will no longer be able to enter because of someone else’s abuse. Getting into a car, certain that others will respect the rules governing it, is an act of trust in others and in the nation.
Rome forgets that leaving unpunished those who take what the rules deny them extinguishes all trust in the honest citizen. The ‘decent person’ knows it is not the fault of the magistrate, who applies what he finds, nor the carabiniere [a member of Italy’s national gendarmerie], who arrests a man at dawn and sees him leave through the back door at noon. The ‘decent person’ realises clearly that the fault lies with the law, with rules written by those whose homes stand in places those who are not ‘decent’ would never dream of ‘visiting’. When the state chains its defenders and frees those who despise it, it breaks the trust on which every civilisation rests.
For decades it has been patiently explained to us that ‘it is more complicated than it seems’ and that hardship and context make certain behaviour inevitable. You, ‘decent person’, pay and keep quiet, since you are in the wrong; you do not count for enough to be allowed to express your profound dissent.
Having the audacity to defend your own home, demanding the peace of mind to move through your town as through your country, is to ask for something too noble in some nations, especially those that gave birth to everything now called Civilisation.
But there is a threshold. History knows it, and the powerful always remember it too late. A people that pays and is not defended remains patient for a long time; that is its virtue, and its curse. It keeps quiet, endures, trusts. Until one morning it trusts no more. Then it does not write petitions: it takes to the streets. That day it asks no permission, and brings no good manners. It would be wise for those sitting on high to remember this today, before the streets remind them.