Not all disabilities are visible

Rome, Chamber of Deputies
The challenge for inclusion:
the future of
people with disabilities

The human being is capable of great positive actions, of generosity, but also of hatred and blind selfishness to the point of indifference towards others. This is the disability to be fought, the only possibility of defeating it until it is removed is to promote paths of social cohesion in the communities and to implement inclusion policies.

After more than two months of restrictions, the increase in people, particularly with disabilities and the elderly, at risk of social exclusion is one of the emergencies that we are called to face with extreme urgency.

The effects of the pandemic have been devastating for our country and the group of people in difficulty has widened so much that the social security of the entire peninsula is at serious risk.

I am referring in particular to families, in whose bosom people with serious and very serious disabilities live, left alone and who are therefore in alarming conditions and who, in all probability, will get worse with the continuation of the health emergency and indifference with the consequent increase in the poverty rate.

The increase in episodes of indifference or even hostility towards people with disabilities and the elderly is an indication of insecurity and a symptom of an ongoing process of disintegration and a drift towards closure and selfish attitudes.

In the face of this context, social policies show serious difficulties because they are centered on fragmented interventions without a strategic plan. I am thinking, for example, of the PEBA, plans for the elimination of architectural barriers which, although they have been part of our legislation since 1986 (Law 41), have however been adopted by very few municipalities. Within this climate, it is increasingly difficult to prove what the added value that can derive from relationships, in particular those related to participation in collective life and the construction of forms of coexistence between communities or the development of forms of responsibility and common response to needs.

The goal to be achieved, and only together will we be able to do so, is to improve the well-being of communities by promoting cohesion and therefore the construction of contexts in which solidarity, accessibility, in a word inclusion become a rule and not a fact awesome.

This pandemic is teaching us that we need free public health, we need scientific research, we need a solidarity policy, capable of the future, to generate educational models suited to the complexity of our time. We need to assert the value of the common good to overcome the barrier of selfishness. We do not need walls but bridges to be able to build, after the pandemic, a cooperative, supportive, responsible, ecological, heterogeneous, open society, in a word, for everyone.

Salvatore Cimmino