After a long hiatus, I am again feeling the need to get back to sharing my thoughts on a daily basis. The last six months have been challenging - needless to say, many felt plunged into a long night of wars, economic turmoil, and divisions. Having said that, I am back at my typing machine not to cast more shadows on our daily lives but because I feel renewed optimism about what lies ahead. Humanity had had it worse than today and somehow always made it on top and pushed progress forward, and many have seen a dramatic improvement in their situation in the last centuries and decades. Who are we not to go for that same progress? Who are we to leave this long midnight perduring any longer?
Our collective duty today is not only to solve the immediate crisis we face but to look beyond the current obstacles to imagine tomorrow’s society. If we limit ourselves to mending today’s problem and then carrying on as business as usual, history shows that the next generation - or the one after - will face the same issues we are fighting against today. This thought struck me today while walking in a small Italian village where I came to visit my mother. On the wall of a local school, there’s a marble plaque consumed by the weather, reporting the words of a famous writer, Primo Levi, who was interned in Auschwitz: “If understanding is impossible, however, knowledge is imperative, because what happened could happen again. Conscience can be seduced and obscured again: even our consciences.” Two generations after one of the biggest tragedies perpetrated by humanity, peoples that suffered extensively from those events - Russians and Ukraine - are back at war. Once more, the world is split in supporting the aggressor and the aggressed, even if there’s no doubt about who’s who.
So, once more, we must ensure that current tragedies are promptly solved. Still, our fundamental task is building a framework that avoids pitting humans against humans and that prevents one’s interests from crashing one other’s rights. This is why we are building Atlas as a global party, but a political vehicle is not enough on its own: without a cultural revolution, institutions cannot change. This is why we are working hard to create Equitism, a new school of thought for this new century.
Please read here to see what we have worked on in the past, and get ready for the future!
Andrea
Andrea Venzon (he/him)
Co-Founder
Atlas
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