A stupid octogenarian who spouts nonsense at cyclists and let the sky shine. Indignation from politicians, indignation from relatives of the victims, indignation from associations. Requests for resignation and promises of lawsuits for incitement to commit crimes.

Blame those in government

But please. Blame the choices of local administrators, who with a few exceptions (thanks for the signals you are giving, Mayor Lepore of Bologna) govern our cities as if everything revolved around the private car, stuck immobile in the Seventies. Blame the legislator, i.e. the Parliament and the parliamentarians, who are approving a reform of the criminal Highway Code which could really contribute – not just as a joke – to killing or making life more distressing for your sister, your son or your father. It is because of Salvini or the not very courageous choices of Sala (Milan) and Gualtieri (Rome) and their inconsistent mobility councilors that we die, not because of Feltri’s jokes. And instead you took it out on a mumbling old man who should only be laughed at, playing his game.

Here comes the wave

Actually, what am I talking about laughing. We should do something else: take the signal. Paradoxically a positive signal, an extraordinary clue. What’s happening? Why does an ignorant and reactionary dinosaur like Vittorio Feltri take it out on those who travel by bike? Why does he parrot barbershop nonsense about cycle paths? But the answer is very simple: because this whole world, which did not exist, is finally among us. Definitively among us. And the exponents of the past who were hostile to evolution feel surrounded, they understand that there is no escape, they sense that what they have seen everywhere, in any Western country, is about to come to us too. It’s just a matter of time and very profound and unprecedented delays. But the wave, even if seriously late, arrives sooner or later and you can’t stop it, just slow down a bit…

No young person is interested in owning the burden of a car anymore (if anything, it is rented when needed); no family takes lightly the enormous expenses involved in the abuse of a private car; wherever we proceed with pedestrianism, greenery, cycling, zones 30, cities improve, house values ​​rise, commerce flourishes, traffic decreases and above all accidents and mortality rates decrease.

The bike is the future

More and more people are understanding this, the official data are unequivocal and it is increasingly difficult to cover them up, more and more associations are doing extraordinary activism work (on Friday 27 September in Milan there will be a human cycle path to protect at least for an hour a bike lane traditionally occupied by the uncivilized of the wild parking around the Polyclinic), dozens of social profiles are being created that make clear and convincing disclosure on these issues and also large information bodies (like the one where we read) are opening their eyes and spreading a completely different interpretation of mobility compared to the one used by the bullies, the miserable, the ignorant of the last century who contributed to ruining the country like Vittorio Feltri.

If this rabble well represented by Feltri reacts, if they feel like old lions in a cage, if they foam with anger and if they are constantly foaming at the mouth stuck in their cars while cyclists pass by them left and right, it is only a sign that the process of change is scaring them, it’s annoying them, it’s underlining how much they have remained on the wrong side of history incapable of evolving. There is something to celebrate, not to be indignant about.