God Bless America. In the U.S., more than a blessing, this is a constant and comforting background which one hardly notices anymore. It provides the closing of almost every official statement, presidential statements or stump speeches, but also for journalists, actors, singers. It is a request to a secular god for a blessing that crosses all religions and protects all citizens.

The value assigned to it is directly proportional to the person who pronounces it, and so the attention it gets from the listener. It rings as pure hypocrisy coming from a president who did nothing to protect Americans from the tsunami of the virus, or I can be moved and understand the depth of this invocation when a governor who is doing whatever he can to help his city and his state. God bless New York.

In our country, where a politician can shamelessly appropriate the rosary or a prayer — indeed as a void slogan that does’n represent any value, I do not say Christian, but not even of community or solidarity – I miss a similar sentence, a simple God bless Italy that we could all use in this period of dark uncertainty, to invoke a common denominator to which everyone, believers in any god and non-believers, could rely to invoke the same wish – for healing, for rebirth, of an ultimate goal that we all want.

So God bless Italia, God bless the whole world: a wish to all of us to work together, to help one another, to learn from the mistakes made before and during this scourge, and to come out better. We should not leave this task exclusively to a lonely man in a rain-wet square …