Four years after the arrival of the covid virus, few remember that exceptional period. Sadly, memory only retains the cases of corruption that surrounded the purchase of medical supplies by the administration.
The year in which the real estate bubble burst, the CEO of a construction company described in this way what the role of some public officials had been during that gold rush. “It is as if all councilors, when they are elected, receive a ticket that gives them the option to participate in a reclassification or in an urban plan. It’s up to them how they use it.” The consequence, he added, had been the creation of a parallel circuit of black money. “Because, of course, companies pay all those people for their services, but they have to pass that extra cost on to housing prices.”
In his version of how things had gone, the man placed most of the blame on the public sector in the formation of the bubble and in what became known as the culture of the ball. It was a cynical and somewhat twisted interpretation. But he expressed a widespread belief then in the business world according to which public servants were labile people who could be tempted. Said in bar language: “find me a councilor or a technician who is short of money and we will end up understanding each other.”
It was the year 2008. By then the banks had already turned off the tap on real estate credit and large groups in the sector were filling the black business chronicle with bankruptcies and suspensions of payments. The hangover affected the financial entities that participated in the party. And the courts were filled with lawsuits that had to be resolved in later years. In an image that was widely used those days, the retreat of the tide had left all the shame in the air.
The waters have receded again, this time from everything that surrounded the administration's management of the covid pandemic in 2020. David Runciman, a prestigious British political commentator, has written these days about the disappointment caused by looking back and verify that of all the exceptional situations that we experienced in that period, we are only able to remember the worst.
The truth is that we have almost forgotten what happened in those weeks of spring 2020. A little memory: in the second half of March, days after the virus appeared in Italian Lombardy, the fear of An unknown disease left us in a state of shock and quietly entered all the houses.
Fear gave way to pain. We found that the virus was taking its toll on the most vulnerable. With the elders, the oldest, in some cases forced to die alone without being able to say goodbye. It was also cruel to the poorest: if you lived in overcrowded conditions, you had more numbers to get infected. In the end, the fatigue of confinement arrived, the collateral damage of isolation, locked up at home waiting for the health administration to put an end to it.
Not everything was horrible. There were brave professionals, generous people. We live strangely calm and silent hours. For a few days the humans thought they were together, that they had something in common. There was a lot of money from the State (the kind that never falls from the sky) to prevent the system from collapsing. And the vaccines arrived with unusual speed, just a year later. For a few months the sky was clear, and some thought the fight against global warming had been won.
But that feeling of fullness lasted as long as the fear lasted, just as long as we felt threatened. When that urgency disappeared, so did the good intentions.
Meanwhile, governments and administrations had entered a mad race to obtain masks first and vaccines later. Shipments contracted by one country ended up in the hands of another if it offered more money. China and Russia manufactured mediocre vaccines that they used as foreign propaganda. Western countries financed better vaccines, but hoarded them, in a gesture that the poorest countries have not forgotten.
Among us, while there were people who risked their lives, there were also those who, as happened with the real estate bubble, thought that they had been given a ticket that they had to take advantage of.
The fourth anniversary of the Covid pandemic will be sadly remembered for all that. Because of the stories of smart and determined guys, commission agents who put administrations in contact with companies that imported masks from China. They could be friends or acquaintances of politicians. They could even be relatives of politicians: the partner, the brother, the father. In some cases there was nothing strictly criminal in their way of doing things. Speculation is the mother of opportunities. But it was immoral behavior, unacceptable for public servants who knew, or at least suspected, what was happening around them.
To put it David Runciman's way, the covid pandemic has had a long-lasting version in the form of hypocrisy and political corruption. The smart guys came out of the housing crisis relatively well. The smart guys of the covid, however, arouse a particular aversion and their discovery has only deepened the loss of confidence of citizens in the system. Surely the most essential good, and the most fragile, in these times of political uncertainty.
