“I don’t take lessons from a blue-haired bastard”, “I’m sorry for your mother who has a motherfucker like you”, “get a life of failure”. These are some of the comments under a post taken at random on social media. An ordinary reel, in which we talked about the relationship between man and dog, which turned into a swamp of insults between users, shifting the focus from the content to their anger.

You don’t need to get to the ongoing wars to realize the climate of hatred that governs these times, or even line up the news stories featuring ever younger faces – victims but also executioners -, you just need to scroll through Instagram, or other platforms, to see first-hand a frightening and blind violence, which we have now internalized to the point that it almost no longer surprises us. We are addicted to aggression.

A different face to face with pain

In this dark picture, the gesture of Davide Cavallo – the 22-year-old Milanese student who last October was brutally attacked by a pack of kids, risking his life and suffering permanent damage – is a bright glimpse that gives hope. During the trial of his tormentor, Alessandro Chiani, 19, who stabbed him to steal 50 euros from him, and of his peer who was with him and witnessed the attack without intervening, Ahmed Atia, Davide sought a different face to face with that pain. In the courtroom, before the sentence – 20 years of imprisonment for Chiani, for attempted murder and robbery, 10 months for Atia, guilty of failure to provide aid – the victim, who walks with the help of two trekking poles due to significant motor limitations, asked to come closer to them and hugged them. He had already said he had forgiven them, but that hug gave it a concrete form, shaking the soul of those who only invoke pitchforks in the face of violence.

They spoke, Atia gave him a letter, apologizing, telling him: “You could be my brother.” A moment of extraordinary humanity, which is moving today. When the verdict was read, those in the courtroom said that Davide was amazed by such a severe sentence, almost sorry. “It’s not do-goodism. I refuse to give in to what they decided to be that evening,” he told journalists after the trial, explaining his decision not to give in to hatred, against all logic.

Emotion and scandal

The power of forgiveness, which on the one hand excites but on the other scandalizes. This is the wall that needs to be broken down. Now considering forgiveness as something old, for the weak, for ‘failed priests’. An unattainable choice in a world where the streets are full of threats from which one must defend oneself with equal violence, or at least with firmness. In perpetual resistance.

Davide Cavallo’s embrace of his attackers, however, shows us the possibility of not hating, the beauty of lowering our ‘weapons’ and becoming human again. And the strength it takes to do it today. Because forgiveness is anything but for losers.