(by Rossella Daverio) There are many, on this Wednesday 9 May 2018, to approach the face of Aldo Moro to that of Peppino Impastato.

They are right. Remembering them together is not just right. It's a duty.

The "synchronicities" of life, which the acumen of his friend Francescomaria Tuccillo evoked yesterday, are never anodyne. It is no coincidence that Aldo and Peppino were massacred on the exact same day as forty years ago. The elderly professor from Maglie - steeped in culture, lucid, thoughtful, tormented, elegant in his ways and deeply Christian - and the young journalist from Cinisi - mocking, reckless, impulsive, shameless, bearded and communist - shared a fundamental common trait, that led them both to death: the courage to change.

And what did they want to change? The balance of power. In Rome, the vision of Moro, accepted and shared by another great protagonist of those years, Enrico Berlinguer, aimed at creating a new political-social dialogue, anticipating the evolution of the world, aware of the irreversible crisis of the Catholic political model from a side and soviet on the other, and representative of the totality of the Italian people. In Cinisi, a village near Palermo that became a "fundamental junction in the mafia balance of western Sicily", the young Radio Aut in Impastato broke the unwritten law of omertà, targeted the very powerful Don Tano Badalamenti, denounced the abuse and the arrogance mocked, made stronger by the servility of those who accepted it as obvious. Both - Aldo and Peppino - were putting at risk positions of command that, in Rome as in Cinisi, considered untouchable, dominated in the shade people, territories and institutions, accumulated wealth, distributed prebends, corrupted or left to corrupt. And often they came to terms with each other. Already. As the historic sentence of Palermo 20 April 2018 has highlighted without uncertainty, the Mafia and the state have shared over the years "papels" of understanding, written by the mafia leaders and intended for high representatives of the government of the nation, blackmailed in its laws, in its ethics and its constitutional values.

To return to Aldo and Peppino, a question is asked in this regard that few have made on this day. Why did the State, firmly in not wanting to deal with Moro's assassins, instead come to terms with those of Impastato? Why this difference in treatment between two equally criminal interlocutors? Because the same figure, that of Giulio Andreotti, emblematic example of opaque exercise of power, considered "absolutely unacceptable" to negotiate the liberation of a statesman with "a handful of desperate people destined for defeat", ie the BR, and instead "with his Conducted and not without personal gain, he consciously and deliberately cultivated a stable relationship with the criminal gang organization »? These are the words written in the sentence of the Court of Appeal of Palermo, unfortunately forced to absolve him for the prescription of the crime while underlining its proven responsibilities of connivance with Cosa Nostra.

The answer to the question is always contained in the same damn word: "power". While the liberation of Moro would destabilize the powerful of the time, the alliance with the mafia contributed to strengthen them, since Cosa Nostra had infiltrated to the top of the institutions. One of the magistrates of Palermo who represented the accusation in the negotiation process told me, in an encounter I had the privilege of having with him: "There have been periods of our history in which we can not speak of" relationship " between the state and the mafia because the state was the mafia ".

But then, if so, if at this point we could get, if the murders of Moro, Impastato (and hundreds of victims of the Mafia) have been convenient to many, if the hidden powers have come up to the government of the nation and they conditioned him ... it's our fault too. Because we are the state. Moro told his students: "Stop talking about institutions as if they were" other "from you. You are the institutions, you are the ones who make them live, it is you who can judge them and you have the right to change them ".

It's true. And what does it mean concretely for us now that the state is us?

Let's take an example. Today, 9 may 2018, forty years after the massacres of Via Caetani and Cinisi, we are about to see the proposal of a "truce" executive, wanted by the President of the Republic (not near to Aldo Moro in thought and impressed in affected by the mafia, who killed his brother Piersanti). It would be, this government of truce, the only way to arrive with a little competence and dignity to the fundamental political, economic and social events that await the gap in Italy both in Rome and in Brussels, where in June we will discuss immigration , work and budget of the Union. It will probably be rejected by a divided Parliament, dominated by populism, unprepared for its task and conditioned by two individuals - Matteo Renzi and Silvio Berlusconi - who for reasons of egolatry and interest prevent it from playing the decisive role that the Constitution reserves. So we will have to return to vote shortly, without motivation and without the possibility of really affecting the evolution of the real, because we will do it with the same unworthy electoral law, of Renzian matrix and ridiculous name ("Rosatellum", like a scarce rosé wine quality), which led us to the quagmire in which we find ourselves.

We are all, I think, in a state of confused resignation in the face of this dangerous instability, whose consequences are likely to affect especially the weakest and the smallest among us and to stake the very foundations of democracy.

If the resignation replaced the rebellion - if we went back to the streets as we once did, if we would write a petition to the two Presidents of the Houses with millions of signatures, if we sometimes remembered the first line of the Constitution - perhaps the teachings that that 9 may Forty years ago it transmits us they would not be in vain.

The lines that give the title to these lines are by Fabrizio de André and refer to another May, ten years earlier. May 1968. Cantava de André:

«Although our may
He did without your courage,
If the fear of looking
He made you chin up,
If the fire spared
Your millennials,
Even if you believe yourselves absolved
You are forever involved. "

Let's dedicate them to Aldo and Peppino, because their May has really done without our courage. That of each and every one of us, even if we were born after they were already dead. As long as we keep chin down for fear of looking, we will all be accomplices of their murder. And we can not believe we are absolved.