It’s this old tune that I immediately thought of when I left a performance of the play The son at the Théâtre du Rideau Vert.
Posted at 6:00 a.m.
This play by Florian Zeller, a young, world-renowned French author, is a true masterpiece. It is, among other things, daring because it goes completely against the current of victimization and disempowerment that are increasingly prevalent in Western societies, especially in Quebec.
That’s life !
The story is simple. An estranged father and mother come to terms with their teenage son’s deep malaise, which leads him to nearly kill himself in front of them, just when they thought they had saved him.
That’s all ! Beyond the remarkable interpretation of the actors and the efficiency of the staging, the strength of this story lies in its truth and its simplicity, both universal and timeless.
What is striking is that we are not placed before any culprit or responsible, that there is no real explanation for the tragedy: everyone did what they could to save the teenager whose only reproach to his father is that he left his mother for a woman he fell in love with.
The only conclusion to be drawn from the case is that, as the French say: c’est la vie! The marvelous, the dog of life…
It is neither the fault of the parents, nor of those around us, nor of the system, nor of this government that we are now accusing of everything that is wrong in our lives, and in life in general.
How easy it is to forget that the latter is – and will always remain – unfair, if only because some people are born healthy and others are not.
There are also individuals whom nature has endowed with truly exceptional talents, more prosaically people who are beautiful and others who are not, or who are less so, as we say today to offend no one. .
It seems that babies smile more spontaneously at beautiful people who lean over their cradles than at others. Is it possible to imagine an injustice more difficult to eradicate than this?
Shanghai like Saint-Rémi-d’Amherst
Both men and women are subject to the injustice of life. Blacks and whites, rich and poor, successful and unsuccessful. The Chinese in Shanghai taste it, as do the Quebecers in Saint-Rémi-d’Amherst.
Without forgetting animals, even more subject than us to injustice, to the terrible law of the jungle: “I am only a small part of the great All: yes, but animals condemned to life, all sentient beings born under the same law, live in pain and die like me. (Voltaire)
But why talk about these sad things, some will think, convinced that the accent should rather be put on this noble and powerful ideal which is the quest for justice and equality for all? Because it is an ideal, precisely, and the best way for a society to sink into misfortune is to give in to ideological obsessions disconnected from what life is fundamentally.
What could be fairer and more beautiful on paper at the start than this communism which served as a pretext, in the last century, for psychopaths like the Russian Stalin and the Chinese Mao to assassinate and torture hundreds of millions of people ?
Indecent
We have to talk about it because the disempowerment, victimization and infantilization of citizens in the face of public authorities are reaching unparalleled heights in Quebec, frankly indecent in a society as privileged as ours on the scale of the universe.
We have to talk about it because some have come to invent super-rich people to tax who do not exist in the most egalitarian society on the continent.
As soon as a private misfortune occurs – if it is still possible to use this expression – the spontaneous reaction is to sink into lamenting victimhood, in search of someone responsible on the side of the public authorities who are asked to intervene. urgently.
The goal is to protect us even more from life, with the ever greater limitation of individual spaces of freedom that will result.
One of the great values of Western societies – this is less true of the rest of the world – is the value of justice, equality and security for all. This can not make us forget that this quest, exceeded a certain limit, contains something anti-life, incompatible with the individual responsibility inseparable from democracy, without forgetting this diversity and this freedom which make the salt of any civilized society.
The ancient Greeks told us: everything is in measure and in balance.