When Silence Becomes Complicity: A Letter From a Warm Rimini Night

On Gaza, Wilfred Owen, and the unbearable arithmetic of indifference

The night air in Rimini smells of salt and jasmine.

I’m writing this from my wheelchair, the window open, the sound of distant scooters rising from the street like a soft mechanical tide. And yet, somewhere far from this Adriatic calm, children are dying tonight. They’re dying as I type. They will be dying when you read this.

So tonight I’m not writing about black holes or quantum fields. Tonight I’m writing about pain.

The Question That Won’t Let Me Sleep

Why does almost every war eventually find its end — except the one in Gaza?

I’ve turned this question over in my mind like a stone you keep in your pocket, smooth from worry. Conflicts that once seemed eternal have quieted. Negotiations open, ceasefires hold, embassies reopen. But Gaza burns on, month after month, broadcast in fragments through our screens until the suffering itself becomes background noise.

That’s the cruelest part. The numbing.

Wilfred Owen, the British poet who died at twenty-five in the trenches of WWI, wrote a line I keep returning to: “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.” He believed poetry’s task was to be a truthful witness to atrocity, not a tool to “buttress morale and feed patriotism” . A century later, his warning still cuts.

Because what we’re losing in Gaza isn’t only lives. We’re losing pity itself.

The Anaesthesia of the Comfortable

Simone Weil once wrote that we have to prevent suffering “from being diluted so that it should be intolerable”. Read that again, slowly.

Diluted suffering is precisely what algorithms feed us. A clip here, a headline there, a thirty-second reel sandwiched between an ad for sneakers and a cooking video. The horror gets watered down until we can swallow it with our espresso. And once we can swallow it, we stop demanding it end.

Owen wrote of soldiers who died “as cattle” — “only the monstrous anger of the guns / Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle / Can patter out their hasty orisons” . Replace “guns” with “drones,” “trenches” with “apartment blocks,” and the verse refuses to age. The technology evolves. The pity does not.

So why this particular silence? Why does the world’s moral vocabulary seem to short-circuit when the word “Gaza” enters the sentence?

What I Think Is Really Happening

I’ll be direct. I’m not a diplomat — I’m a physicist with a wheelchair and a stubborn heart, so forgive the bluntness.

Geopolitics has always sorted suffering into hierarchies. Some victims are grievable, others inconvenient. When a war becomes economically useful, ideologically protected, or politically embarrassing to end, it doesn’t stop — it gets managed. Managed wars are the worst kind, because management implies acceptance.

Václav Havel, who knew something about systems built on lies, observed that ideology becomes “an instrument of internal communication which assures the power structure of inner cohesion” . In plain Italian: governments tell themselves stories so they can keep doing what shouldn’t be done. And we, the citizens, often nod along because the alternative — actually feeling it — is too expensive.

Gaza is expensive to feel.

The Pain You’re Describing Is Not Weakness

You wrote of pain endured while the world stays silent. I want to tell you something I’ve learned from years of surgeries, hospital ceilings, and nights when my body refused to obey me.

Pain that comes from witnessing injustice is not pathology. It’s a sign your moral compass still works.

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to a young poet that we mustn’t be frightened “if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen.” Because, he said, “life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall” . Rilke believed sadness is often the future entering us before we recognize it — “the future stands still… but we move in infinite space” .

The grief you feel for Gaza tonight is the future asking you to become someone slightly braver tomorrow.

Soul on Deck

A few days ago, on the 11th of June, I read something by Clarissa Pinkola Estés that struck me with the force of a wave: “Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times” .

She reminds us that “ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach” . She insists that dramatic change requires “an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing” . And then this line, which I’ve written on a card next to my desk: “It does not take everyone on Earth to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale” .

NEVER GIVE UP. That’s the sentence I’ve lived by since I was a child arriving in Italy from Albania, barely five years old, with a body that wouldn’t cooperate and a future no doctor would guarantee.

It applies tonight, too.

What We Can Actually Do

I won’t insult you with a list of easy actions. Posting a flag emoji doesn’t stop a missile. But silence isn’t neutral either — silence is a vote.

Speak about Gaza by name, in your kitchen, at your dinner table, in your classroom. Refuse the dilution. Donate to organisations that get medical aid through, however imperfectly. Pressure your elected representatives — yes, the ones who pretend not to read emails. Read journalists who are still risking their lives to document what’s happening, and amplify them. Teach your children that some lives are not, in fact, worth less than others, no matter what the news cycle implies.

And when you feel that black, heavy exhaustion that comes from caring about something the powerful want you to forget — rest, but don’t quit.

Note for the reader: I’ve simplified the philosophical and historical references here so the heart of the argument stays accessible. The full texts of Owen, Rilke, Havel and Estés deserve your slow attention when you have the time.

A Confession Before I Close

I don’t have a clean ending for you tonight. Honest writing rarely does.

I’m a young man in a wheelchair in Rimini, with a degree in astronomy and a master’s in physics, and none of my equations explain why a child in Rafah deserves less protection than a child in Bologna. The mathematics is the same. The atoms are the same. The capacity to suffer is identical.

What differs is our willingness to look.

Albert Camus, walking through Algerian ruins in summer, wrote that he found within himself “an invincible summer” — a force that “refreshes” and sends him back to “his work of being a voice against injustice”. That’s the work. That’s all of it.

Tonight, from this small Italian balcony, I refuse the dilution. I refuse the hierarchy of grievable lives. I refuse to treat Gaza as background noise.

And tomorrow, when the sun comes up over the Adriatic and the beach umbrellas open like coloured flowers, I’ll keep refusing. Quietly, stubbornly, scientifically. With pity intact.

Because soul on deck still shines like gold. Even here. Even now. Even for those the world has tried to forget.

— Gerd, FreeAstroScience, Rimini, a warm June night, 2026