The proliferation of instruments and programs apt to better govern the different aspects of our work and of our lives, on one hand gives us a sense of security and power, on the other makes us feel dependent on the means that offer us such opportunities.
If our mobile doesn’t work, if our on-board computer decides to stop functioning, if our PDA cannot connect with the office, our contacts with people and our work schedules are strongly affected.
At that point, our intelligence can be used only to utter refined imprecations.
Often, the choice to trust in more powerful and refined instruments is dictated more by artificially induced needs than by real personal necessities. This dilemma - delicate and difficult to manage and ambiguous in its interpretations - reminds one of the analysis that Pier Paolo Pasolini made 40 years ago in the comparison between Development and Progress. With the first term, he referred to the trend toward an increasing production of goods with the real benefit of a few, and with the second, the improvement of collective conditions of life. The brave social critiques of the author of Scritti Corsari seen in light of today’s reality were premonitory, to say the least. And recent studies by world renowned economists underscore a trend toward socio-economic imbalances that catapult us two hundred years back.
If we project these considerations to the world of tissue, each of us can come to conclusions based on our own personal history, but in the end we are bound to advocate for this field that, simultaneously with a constant improvement in its production means, has promoted the qualification of hygiene, allowing important quality leaps in all those situations where it has become part of everyday living.
The absence of water and hygienic services is not only cause of disease, but it also exposes - women particularly - to risks of aggression. In India, “Around 60 percent of the rural population defecates in the open and women and girls are expected to go out at night. This does not only threaten their dignity, but their safety as well,” UNICEF representative Louis-Georges Arsenault said in a statement.
The difficulties in finding new roads to solve our economic problems could well take into serious consideration the most needy “clients”: Perhaps it is not an atomically wealthy market, but it is certainly numerically large.
Maura Leonardi