Concern over the fate of children in the world today is the lowest common denominator which all the various parties, ideologies and societies of the world ultimately converge and agree upon. That is to say, at least all those who signed the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, the leaders of 193 States. The non-signatories include Somalia and - most notably - the United States!
A number of years ago, someone - from the American continent, in fact - talked about a war against children in this age of the world. Amongst others, this is one of the apocalyptic scenarios that accompany the present human season, along with the global climate, terrorism, the economy, starvation and critical shortage of water; indeed, it is intertwined with all these.
What James Hillman - an old friend of the Pio Manzù Centre - says, then, is perfectly true: “Children have become the sacrificial victims of Saturn-Moloch, as they were in the ancient Mediterranean civilisations. They are also the scapegoats of all our positivistic fears regarding the abnormal, the excessive, and the divergent flights of the imagination at their earliest appearance - namely, in children” (The Soul’s Code).
Exploitation, sterilisation, forced mutilation, forced mendacity, punishment, starvation, etc.. A thousand media channels inundate us as in some murky floodtide, which, with ferocious explicitness, heaps upon us the magnified image of what has become commonplace: the war against children, whether yet to be born, newborn, infants, or minors, for whom the world should mean the sun, the moon, father, mother, education, nutrition, health, affection and the right to dream.
What kind of world can call itself “advanced” that delivers into the mouth of Hell the living flesh and blood of its own descendents, our very future, the physiological world of tomorrow on which the health and prosperity of the Earth will depend? Yet apocalyptic challenges cannot be met simply by apocalyptic responses. At least, not as long as we conserve within us a sense of moral and intellectual abhorrence, a sense of shame and of the sins committed against our own kind, without yielding to a macabre fatalism.
What is the present-day situation of children in the many different theatres of the world in the wake of the 193 signatures? The aim of the 33rd edition of the Pio Manzù Conference is to define the state of the art in this area.
An ancient African fable narrates that during a forest fire all the animals, including the lion, started to flee in panic. Only a lone humming-bird was seen flying intrepidly towards the flames. The lion, king of the jungle, therefore asked the tiny bird why it was making with such haste for the place where everything was ablaze, and the humming-bird replied that it was doing so precisely for that reason, to put out the fire. But it was impossible to douse such vast flames with only the drop of water it carried in its beak, objected the lion, to which the humming-bird replied: “I am doing my bit”.
However impossible it might seem to those of us who know our own forest to extinguish a fire that is spreading fast in all directions, no morally responsible human being can refrain from doing his bit. The truth is that from the young tree that catches fire beside me the flames will soon spread to my own trunk. Thus, the rationality of the lion needs to be illuminated by the faith of the humming-bird.
If the panels of the 33rd edition of the Conference abound with tiny, fragile humming-birds, this is clearly because the tactics whereby universal dramas are tackled nowadays have changed.
In other words, there are people who no longer leave matters to others, who no longer put things off, but who act now to put things right.
These challenges are beginning to be met in new ways, with each of us carrying as much water as he or she is capable of carrying.
The wondrous flight of the humming-bird soars above the roaring of the flames, calling out to those who are ready to transform themselves from animals in flight to members of a small fire-fighting relay team. Not asking the impossible, but only what is humanly possible. And the realm of the possible touches sentient human beings and urges them to take action.
Their actions may be no more than mere drops of water, but if this concert of voices and actions can make itself heard in the silence, it may yet have a worldwide impact.