What does ‘building goodness’ mean? It means working for a more humane world. For a more habitable present and a brighter future. And we can start by reaching out to our neighbours. From feeling their life as if it were our own. We must observe their wounds with participation. Take care of them.

What does trying to build “goodness” mean? It means working for a more human world. For a more livable present and a brighter future. We cannot not start from reaching out our hand to the next person, to do it. To listen to their life as if it were ours. We must observe with participation their wounds. To take care of them.

But working for a better world also means looking at the collective wounds in the face: social and cultural. Those common and big ones, painfully shared. It means offering our own contribution, may it be big or small, to cure these wounds. The welfare of the community depends on it.

There are definitely plenty of wounds in our times of individualism and technological dominion. Let’s not close our eyes in front of them if we care for the common good. Let’s talk about it as suffering, even when it seems as though its only touching the other person, becomes also ours whether we like it or not. Let’s medicate these wounds together in order to make this human boat on which, willingly or unwillingly, we all sail on.

There’s bullying, contaminated and aggravated by the contemporary form of cyberbullying, in the current community of human beings. Undeniable. It is an old phenomenon; someone may say yet is not negligible for this reason. It is also a new phenomenon: powerful and dangerous because of technology, of the double-faced information technology: capable of uniting as well as dividing, to hurt till death.

Bullying is what we are dealing with in our December newsletter, and we do so by starting with a movie recently released in cinemas. A film that touched us: “The boy in the pink trousers”, based on a true story. Inside that film we can see young people’s beauty and suffering. Their fragility. There is a wound that unites them, provoked (also) by very sophisticated instruments: the same social media that eliminates distances can also become a weapon.

The same wound of bullying is also related to a song we talk about: “Non sarò sola mai” (“I will never be alone”) of AsOne, a band from northern Italy. It was sung for the first time at the Genfest 2024 (the international youth event of the Focolare Movement) that was held in Aparecida, Brazil. From the stage, before the performance, Francesca Gallo—one of band’s lead singers—told her experience related to the suffering caused by the bullying she suffered. You can read about it in our newsletter.

To better understand and to learn about the various shades of bullying, and thus to offer some instrument that can be useful to the reader, we interviewed Viviana Colonnetti, an expert on the subject.

With her we spoke about youth and cyberbullying, and in this regard, we added to this newsletter an interesting piece on the responsible use of social media. We borrowed it from Ciudad Nueva Cono Sur, even though it was written quite some time ago by Manuel Nacinovich. In this article we tell you about Faro Digital, an NGO that focuses on studying the uses, the habits and the relations of the citizens with the digital technologies.