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Dear wandering knights, I wonder…

24th September 2009 | 22:02 | Thinking back

This week I was in Nebraska, to attend the 50 years anniversary of the graduation of my class in Lincoln South East High School where I was for a year in 1958/’59 as an American Field Service exchange student. For me it was not only a class reunion, but also an occasion to think back and compare. Flying home, I wrote this letter to my fellow Knights (that’s how the LSE students use to call themselves), hoping to have feedback and discussion.

Dear friends,

a Latin proverb says: semel sacerdos, semper sacerdos. If you become a priest, you will be a priest for ever. May be it works also for journalists: if you have been a journalist sometime in your life, you feel the need to communicate in writing whatever important happens to you.

For me, these days in Lincoln for the LSE’59 anniversary have been important, not only for the warmth of your welcome, but because coming back to Nebraska after 50 years made me think a lot: to similarities and differences between Lincoln in ’59 and now, but also to similarities and differences between people here and in Europe.

In these 50 years, I have been several times in the States, for work or tourism, but never in Lincoln. And now I find that Nebraska (or the people from Nebraska, even if many of you now live somewhere else) is special. Still, after such a long time, here I feel “at home”, more at home than in any other country or state… except Italy, of course.

However, I have two questions, which I hope will keep up a dialogue between us.

First, to put it bluntly: you look happy, but why?. I know that happiness depends on many factors like individual health, family relations, etc. But generally speaking your “subjective well being”, as the social scientists call it, looks better than people in most of the European countries with equal economic standards, and better than people from other areas of the United States. So I wonder: what’s the secret of your life?

I have a professional interest in this question. As an economic journalist, I specialized in communicating data. Statisticians now feel that measuring the wealth of a nation in terms of Gdp, the gross domestic product, is not enough, because political goals have to take into consideration the general well being. I’ll go to Korea at the end of October for an international (Oecd) meeting on this subject. How to measure progress and success of a community? Which are for you the most important determinants of happiness, besides personal/family health and a reasonable income? So I would like to know what is important for you. What do you cherish, what do you fear?

My second question is more troublesome, at least for me. We live in a smaller world, much more  interconnected  than 50 years ago. When I was a foreign student in Lincoln, I wrote letters to my father in Italy and I never had a call because phone calls where too expensive. Now, through Skype, from Lincoln I have been talking daily with the people I love in Italy. However, in spite of this unthinkable progress, I feel that the differences between us have not diminished in these 50 years. Generally speaking, Europeans like me and Americans like you have a different outlook, imagine a different future, worry about different issues. They don’t talk to each other about what is really important:  the world in which our children and grandchildren will live.

After  9/11, we all felt very close to you. I demonstrated with many others in Piazza del Popolo in Rome with posters that said “Siamo tutti americani”. We sent our soldiers to fight against terrorism. Then, what went wrong? Good question. May be it was because of President Bush’s mistakes, may be because of the European tendency to never ending debate without taking common decisions, I feel that today it is not easy to understand each other about what is happening in the world.

In Europe, for example, today we worry a lot about the climate change, the depletion of natural resources, the need to find a different energetic balance, the migrations from the poorest areas of the world. We don’t do enough, but we worry. We wonder how we can manage a world that, a few decades from now, will have ten billion people, half living in megalopolis. And we know that, in just a few years, Chinese and Indians (and Brazilians, Koreans, South Africans, Russians…) will have a per capita level of consumption close to ours. Roughly three billions of consumers instead of one billion between Europe and North America. Something has to change because the Planet cannot bear it; probably we have to give the example even if this has a cost for our standard of living. I think that you have a wonderful community spirit, but that you don’t worry as much as we do about the global community. For instance, your level of energy consumption is much higher than ours. But the world is global, as this global economic crisis teaches us.

What should we do? I am a journalist, I ask questions, I don’t have the answers. In one of the Peanuts, Charlie Brown says that he wants to become a journalist when he grows up, because asking questions is easier than giving the answers.What I know is that we must keep talking, exchanging views, ideas, proposals. We, LSE 59ers, are old enough to be reasonably free to do what we want. We are educated, reasonably wealthy, caring for the others, ready to give our time to what we feel is really important. We should not waste this opportunity.

One more thing: thank you. I said this during our celebration at the Lincoln Country club, on Sept. 19, but I want to say it again. Not only to you, but also to your families, to the city of Lincoln . When I came to Nebraska as American Field Service foreign student I was 16 and I had just lost my mother. I found the wonderful family of Fred, Mary Etta and Ricky Akin and a wonderful LSE. The year in Lincoln changed my life. It gave me self confidence. It gave me a powerful tool for my career, because not many people spoke  English in Italy in 1959. But most of all it gave me an understanding of a different culture. When I went back, I did not want Italy to become like the States, but the positive aspects of the Nebraskan way of life, first of all the community feeling, made me decide that I was not going to be a scientist (as I had written on the Clarion, the high school newspaper) but someone directly active in changing society, like a journalist.

So, these are the things I wanted to tell you. I thank you, I admire you for your spirit, I worry for our common future. You, we, are a very special group of people and we must keep in touch. I hope to see many of you in the Knights’ Italian tour in 2010.

Donato

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