Listen to this story.
It happened yesterday in Gallarate, near Milan. Luciana Baroffi, thirty-six, had her sixteen-year-old daughter Cristina sleeping on the balcony.
Yesterday it was five degrees below freezing.
The neighbors called the police.
Cristina slept on the balcony all the time, but yesterday it was snowing. Cristina is handicapped.
They arrested the mother.
That is the fact. But the story of Cristina and her mother began sixteen years ago, and it continues.
We say: "Good for the neighbors!", "What an unnatural mother!", "How can a mother treat her own daughter that way, a sick daughter at that?", "Thank God the neighbors stepped in. What if instead of calling 113 they had just gone to bed?"
I would have done the same. So would you. And we would have been right. Or would we?
We don't know Luciana's story, but we know the lives of other parents with a child who is different. A life without hope, beginning the day you realize your child is not normal.
Other children grow. He stays small.
Other children run. He drags himself.
Other children speak. He moans.
Other children... and he doesn't.
You carry this weight alone. All day you wash him, feed him, clean him, push him forward. At night he wakes you. There is never a celebration. Never a vacation. Month after month. Until one day you can't take it anymore and you put him on the balcony. On the balcony where the neighbors see him, and they call the police. The only thing they have done in sixteen years.
The neighbors are good people, mothers and fathers who did nothing before. People of conscience just like the rest of us—people who wait for a crisis to move, who never think that crisis, silent and hidden, is happening to others every single day.
Doing something other than making a phone call would have meant effort—spending a few hours, going to see Cristina, taking her out somewhere, giving her mother a chance to breathe; risking maybe the beginning of a feeling inside you that would make you uncomfortable in your own life.
Because people who think only of themselves and don't see others are comfortable. Especially they don't see those who are asking them, even without words.
And if we are asked what we think about the handicapped, we have an answer ready: "He is one of us, he has the same rights we do!!"
Our rights are protected by law. Their needs must be met by law too.
Once they were locked away in institutions, but we came to understand that was not the answer. Now we have decided: integration. Let's bring them back among us, into schools, into neighborhoods, into workplaces. And in doing this we have discovered the limits of that solution.
You cannot erase a handicapped person's difference by telling him "You are the same as me."
Because you cannot make a blind man drive a car by telling him he is the same as you.
Because you cannot make a cripple run with you by telling him he is the same as you.
Then in what way is he the same as us?
In his dignity as a human being, for you who are human.
In his value as a brother, if you know yourself to be a child of God.
But in everyday life, in using a spoon, in tying a shoe, in understanding the world around him—he is different. Completely different.
Then comes the suspicion that telling him "You are the same" is only a way to ease your conscience.
"If you are the same, you have no special need of me. I will work politically, when I have time for it, to make sure you are protected by good laws, treated in good clinics, given the money you need." And of course if I see you on the balcony I will call the police.
My conscience is clear.
Or is it?
The truth is there is still no solution. The handicapped person gets by a little better, but stays isolated, until we decide to take him seriously, even if it costs us very dearly.
Don't forget that there is handicapped and handicapped.
A blind man—you just have to give him your arm. But a cripple you have to lift. A paralyzed man needs everything done for him; and a man with mental disability, whom you cannot hear speak as a man, you have to treat as a person.
And this every day, not one hour a week when you are feeling altruistic, because if he is truly part of your life he is beside you constantly: at his desk, at home, on the bus.
It is a heavy burden to take on. And I must take it, you must take it, by entering a different way of thinking—different from our usual way, the way that tells us to live well and not worry too much.
To change how we think.
Listen to another story.
It could have happened yesterday in Gallarate, near Milan.
Luciana Baroffio, thirty-eight, went to the cinema with friends.
Her daughter Cristina spent the evening at a neighboring family's house, listening to music. Cristina is happy with them. There are many families she visits often, where she spends pleasant hours; she has found many places that welcome her. Her mother is more at peace, not living in a nightmare. Now everything is simpler.
It could have happened. But it didn't. Cristina was sleeping on the balcony when the police arrived.
Manuela Bartesaghi, 1978