The Mafia in the Time of Tik Tok, Remains the same and feeds on our wrongs

CATANIA – It is a mafia that is ready to do anything to survive. A criminal and still violent system that, like an archaic fossil, is renewed in its protagonists but remains intact in its names and surnames. In the families of always that become clans.

The week that is about to end has seen the final outcome of the investigation by the Prosecutor's Office materialize in the massive blitz of the Flying Squad that led to a flurry of arrests for mafia association. Yet another field operation conducted by the forces of law and order.

The confirmation that in Catania the vicious circle of criminal organizations continues in its flourishing work with the main objective of making money. Whether it is drugs or contracts, racketeering or usury: it is the trail of money that marks the path to follow. The time of the manhunt with the deaths killed on the streets recorded at least until the mid-nineties is over, today they operate in a less sensational but more productive way. Insinuating themselves also between the cracks that are anything but sealed in politics and institutions.

So much so that nothing or almost nothing has changed in the methods and in the ability to not suffer any interference. Everything is the same. In the control of the neighborhoods, in the cloak of restless and complicit silence, in that public and defiant display entrusted today to Tik Tok. In the latest raids, a few less holy cards to pray to have been intercepted (transferred to the skin on some tattoo) but the etiquette of surnames is the same as always.

The Santapaolas, the Mazzei Carcagnusis. All families that have never broken their ties with Palermo's Cosa Nostra.
The Laudanis, the Cappellos then Bonaccorsi-Carateddis, the Cursotis, the Sciuto Tignas, the Di Mauro Puntinas, the Pilleras. Groups of families of mafia type, in clear conflict or in temporary alliance with each other depending on the moment and interests.

In the commutative property of a city that cannot free itself from the suffocating stereotype "we have Etna and we have the sea", the addends change but the result is the same. We remain helpless observers. Having caught a regent , another is immediately being made.

In a land where the temporary nature of interventions mixed with constant emergency (recorded in any sector) indirectly feeds a mafia system that feeds on the uncertainty and intolerance of its citizens, everyday life becomes the fertile ground on which to act and make proselytes.

The events related to the chaos on waste, the need to not be caught unprepared in the face of emergencies such as the now ordinary volcanic ash, the failed cultural revolution of waste separation (never mind saying it again waste), water crisis, wrecked roads and highway construction sites with no end date: what do they have to do with the monster of crime? In truth, they are the caption of a collective discomfort that does not generate development and that becomes a suggestion for corruption and the mafia mentality.

And, then no, in these conditions a thousand police operations really wouldn't be enough.