Dear Posterity,

when you will read these lines, given they will let you do so, I won’t be with you anymore. So, I want to tell you, now, my truth on what moves me. You may judge it as imperfect and you’ll be right. But be careful with the truths you like most. If you will search and if you’ll want, you also will be able to discover the truth, and it won’t be much different from the one I know.

Every time I take care of you I have to stop the instinct that would lead me to think about myself and those who care about me. But I manage to find the strength to overcome this atavic egoism I bare inside, also so that you will be able to struggle less than those who preceded you. For you, I have to violate also the probable future attending you.

I want to tell you the truth on what I feel, so that you won’t be free to think everyone tried to prevent you from coming to the world and have the right to live in it struggling to be happy. Someone though of you. And you have the duty to take this in consideration.

When I understood we’ve become so egoist to stop thinking even of our children, after having already abandoned our old, I did all of good I could, to show everyone that it is necessary and possible to modify this evil scenario of sorrow and injustice.

You will say I did little, you will say I try to convince you. I also think I’ve done too little but it’s not true I want to convince you. I just want you to be able to exist with the strength deriving from the intimate awareness that someone hasn’t forgotten about you.

That’s why I did my best. But it was about inventing again a future different from history, without, unfortunately, recognizing the effects in advance. That’s why I had to resist until when I would have managed to blend a singularity of the present with the legitimate wait for future.

This is why I dealt with politics, for you, without asking you anything, because I had the right and duty not to be ashamed. And I fought accepting to loose all the battles so you would win the last one. Yours. Even if I had one chance upon 6 billions.

I didn’t want all this, I didn’t know it would have been necessary, when, that evening, in front of the cemetery gate where my father is buried I swore with these two words: it must change!

I wasn’t willing to devote my self to politics, I wanted to do something else and, partly, I always tried to keep doing it. But, since I’ve taken this choice, I want at least to tell you how I deem politics, that «dirty» thing that should weigh a ton on the conscience of who has always managed it.

I deem politics as means to overcome our limits and as perception of material problems, acknowledging having to face them in order to solve them. I deem them the idea on which the capability to find solution should be based, as effective and proved truth of what’s wrong and the means to overcome our limits, as the emotion to be the protagonist of a demonstration of redemption and will that can only derive from the definition of feasible objectives.

I deem them as instrument of culture, science, art and work, as action to affect reality, to change it, improve it in freedom and democratically, according to the peoples will, meanwhile affecting the historic memory of the causes why humanity has struggled so much to get to this point and so much will have to struggle to build its future.

I deem them as swiftness of thought and action, but also of patience to wait who hasn’t managed yet to renew oneself inside. I deem them as coherence between though, proposal and action, as morality and example. I deem them as interior strength rising from the conscience of one’s own limits and possibilities. And I mean strength to resist and be able to react and of strength to defend one’s own ideas and coherence, overcoming fear.

I deem them as a change, an improvement, because we all put in something better than what we’ve been. I deem them as realism, austerity, rigour and courage to do the right things, despite surrender could appear easier. I deem them as responsibility, as farsightedness, as alternative to conflicts, as free competition to do better than before, as sociality, as civility, as scheduling and pushing economy, to solve material problems while respecting nature.

I deem them as solution, as theory and praxis, as intuit and creativity, as clearness, spontaneity and mission, as discretion and humbleness but also as challenge towards obstacles to achieve an uninvolvable evolutive state.

I deem them as exaltation of future based on reason and the consideration we haven’t been wanted just to live for living some tenth years but also to allow our energies to survive from ourselves eternally. I deem them as means to contribute to the achieving of the individual’s maximum responsibility. I deem them as humanity and modesty, because each one of us is only a small part of the whole.

I deem them as love. Love for my mother, my woman and my children, my friends, love for the people, for all the peoples, for our old, for our children and the children of our children. Until you. Love for nature, which has produced this only chance of conscious beings. Love for who has the responsibility to have done anything in order to prevent the necessary renewal.

And I deem them also as poetry, to start again glance our children in their eyes and not having to lower my eyes because of shame. For me politics have been one of the ways to change the world, so the peoples can hope to be happy. More than I’ve been, among six billion human beings, of which most of them dye of hunger because others pretend they don’t know what to do about it.

Now you know how the one who proposed the contextual and organized renewal of social, civil, politic, economic, moral and religious systems was, what moved him and why he wrote to you. Now you know why the renewal was necessary.

You will ask yourself why did I do that. Just because it was right, believe me. And I beg you to continue this struggle, because every generation needs to believe in its own renewal.

Italy, 11 August 1993.

  Rodolfo Marusi Guareschi