What a shame! I was born in Abruzzo (I came to the US a long time ago) where the case took place. I can't imagine people not raising hell - I guess italians have changed.
How sad though that they are giving up their culture so easily, and to people that want to kill them.
This, in the name of tolerance and multiculturalism - they're tolerant of every one but themselves, respect other's culture, but not their own!!
America is a country that has great things to teach us. Speaking of heroic efficiency let me sing the praises of the Mayor of New York. That Rudolph Giuliani, whom we Italians should thank on our knees. Because he has an Italian last name, he is of Italian extraction, and he makes us look good in the entire world. He is a great, in fact a very great Mayor. This is coming from someone who is never happy about anything or anyone, starting with herself. He is a Mayor worthy of another great Mayor with an Italian last name, Fiorello La Guardia, and many of our Mayors should go to be schooled by him. Present themselves with their heads bowed, in fact with ashes on their heads, and ask him: “Mr. Giuliani, please tell us how to do it.” it.”
He does not delegate his duties to others. He does not waste time in being a prick and thirsting for power. He does not divide his time between being Mayor and a senator or a representative. (is there anyone listening in the three cities of Stendhal, namely Naples, Florence and Rome?). Running to the site immediately, he entered the second skyscraper, and he risked being transformed into ashes with the others. He saved himself by a hair and by chance. Within four days he had the city back on it’s feet again. A city that has nine and a half million residents, note, and two million only in Manhattan. How he did it, I don’t know. He is ill like me, poor man, he makes believe he is well: he works just the same. However, I work at a table, sitting comfortably! He instead…He looked like a general that was personally participating in a battle. A soldier that throws himself forward with his bayonet. “Come on people, Get on with it! Let’s pull up our sleeves and get to work!, hurry!!” He was able to do this because these people were, are, like he is. People without conceit and laziness, my father would have said “people with balls”. As to the admirable capacity to unite, the compact almost martial manner in which the Americans respond to tragedies and the enemy, well, I must admit that there and then it even surprised me. I knew that at the time of Pearl Harbor, the population rallied around Roosevelt, who had entered into the war against Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy and Hirohito’s Japan. I had smelled it, after Kennedy’s assassination.
I don’t know if in Italy you saw and understood what happened in New York, when Bush went there to thank the workers (men and women) that are digging in the ruins of the two towers, trying to save survivors but have not found anything but a nose here a finger there. Without giving up, nonetheless. Without fatalism, so that if you ask them how they do it, they reply, “I can allow myself to be exhausted not to be defeated.” Everyone. Young, very young, old, middle age. Whites, blacks, yellows, browns, purple… Did you see them? While Bush thanks them they waved little American flags, lifted a clenched fist and roared: “USA! USA! USA!”. In a totalitarian state, I would have thought, “look how well the powers have organized this demonstration!”. In America, no! In America one does not organize these things. You can’t command them, you can’t stage them. Especially not in a disenchanted metropolis such as New York, and especially not with New York City workers! They are terrible types, the workers of New York. Freer than the wind. They don’t even obey their unions. But if you touch their flag, if you touch their country…