The water emergency that in recent weeks has created serious inconvenience for thousands of families in Basilicata and dozens of agricultural companies should be overcome soon. The sole director of Acquedotto Lucano says so. Without a doubt it must be overcome, of course. The fact is that that emergency and others that have occurred in the past, including environmental ones, have their causes in a long history of political responsibilities. Normally citizens do not focus on those responsibilities but on the tap in their homes. They do not think of organizing themselves through their parties and their associations, or by joining together for the occasion, with the aim of politically objectifying the issue and problematizing its effects. They do not mobilize. No, they think about the tap: if the water does not come out they get indignant, especially on social media, if the water starts flowing again everything passes, the grumbling slowly dies down. In the meantime, without radical solutions the emergency will resurface as soon as possible. Let’s leave aside the absolute indifference to the problem of those who have not suffered the hardships, that’s another story. Let’s stay on the piece that interests us: why don’t people mobilize on the most burning issues? Why don’t political and trade union organizations mobilize citizens? Because we have a depoliticized population. And we have a de-politicized politics, which cannot be stimulated by a depoliticized society.
If indifference and selfishness conquer other spaces, if the distance between citizens and politics becomes ever greater, Basilicata will end up definitively in the hands of those who in recent years have already pushed it towards a regime governed by an oligarchy of interests. Every form of conflict, opposition, struggle for rights and social justice will disappear. The spaces for civic and collective action will shrink, individual, selfish competition will prevail even more. People will rely more and more on the hegemonic proposal of the political-economic power system that will make decisions without any democratic control. This is what happens when there is a low demand for democracy caused by indifference towards the tools to exercise it. The few spaces for democratic maneuver of free citizens will disappear completely. More than what already happens today, there will be groups of power that compete with each other and take turns in command of the Region and make key decisions. In a not too distant future, someone will have to take care of politics and if free citizens do not do it, they will do it in full autocracy. However, the decline towards the complete depoliticization of social relations and of the approach to public resources and the common good is traced.
And back to the water. Here we discover and experience first-hand what the depoliticization of Lucanian society means. The water crisis of recent weeks and the threatening drought that is affecting agricultural production, give reason for a blindness in the (non-existent) development strategies of the Basilicata Region. Water is one of the fundamental resources of our region, oil belongs to multinationals, beyond the rhetoric. We must avoid further dispersing the blue gold by giving it away to oil companies and multinational bottling companies. We urgently need to seriously intervene on the modernization of the water network. Seriously, why? Because after years of huge resources used, the dispersion of water and the antiquity of the distribution system remain a very serious criticality. And this plays into the hands of those who want to privatize water. The Acquedotto Lucano juggernaut is itself a sieve. And yet we pay the sole administrator and his managers. Sure, but we also pay the politicians.
Here is the conclusion, neither citizens nor politics reason with this perspective. Citizens continue to monitor the taps in their own homes, politics continues to exploit the inconveniences without providing solutions that it should have implemented in these 30 years. So who is to blame? The Lucano Aqueduct. Sure, but that is not how problems are solved. We will see each other at the next emergency of any kind: the culprit on duty to insult on social media or exploit in institutional settings is always found, the responsible party is never, never found.
