December 2019

N.2 Year XIII

REPORT

Dear reader,
you may have noticed, turning on the TV, looking at the news, how the latest events have shown to carry up a protest sign. It takes on various and changing forms, sometimes it is peaceful, others educational, violent or destructive, it is a great movement, often confused and chaotic. Even at the supermarket or in the same university that we share, sometimes it appears immediate to react controversially, to rebel against what reality shows us, whether it is our will or not. It is on these streets, along the buildings of our university, just like the protesters, that we have a question and a goal: make something beautiful, something big. Make a difference. In 1978 Vaclav Havel, speaking of his contemporary dissidents of the communist regime, wrote in “The power of the powerless”: Do [the dissidents] have any influence at all on society and the social system?
Can they actually change anything? That’s the question we started dealing with, working on this issue of Polipo. What’s
the point of protesting? Even when the outcome is difficult, sometimes without hope, there’s still someone who fights tirelessly, because the ideal for which he lives is more important than the result of his actions. A man holding a shopping bag, who clearly knows that he could lose his life can counteract a tank advancing towards Tiananmen Square. The mark left by that man to the world, to all of us, is still alive, and it is still generating actions, thoughts and ideas. In the hope that these pages may reflect the ideal for which it is worth taking action and giving oneself in everyday university life, we wish you a good read!

The Team of Polipo