Zen and archery | Gramellini’s Coffee

Dear sir whom I just touched the rearview mirror at the traffic lights – inadvertently, believe me – I understand your bitterness towards me. I also understand that in the country, pardon the nation, after so much laxity there is a certain air of justice, if not summary, at least hasty. However, before you grab the baseball bat that I see strategically placed on the rear window of your car to come and place it on the back of my neck, I suggest you take a deep breath, so as to give me time to tell you what happened in Genoa in the historic center. .

A craftsman with an archer’s eye leaned out of the window to invite people who were bickering in the street to moderate their voices, but having not received a polite response, he took the bow and shot an arrow that pierced the liver of one of the troublemakers to death.

By dint of invoking zero tolerance we started with l’azzerare l’umanit, losing the awareness that any loss of self-control can have lethal effects. Even the archaic eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth contemplated a proportion between offense and reaction. To the many who spend their days feeling perpetually the victim of some abuse, we should begin to explain that the world, in its indifference, is not angry with anyone. Not even with you, dear sir. So you put down the baseball bat and let’s go get coffee together. Or a chamomile, which better.

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