This week was filled with the resetting of many behaviours, considerations and trajectories. I believe this recalibration must extend to a great many more behaviours. We all know and understand that any breakdown, any negligence, any fault in the rails of any track will most often prove fatal when trains collide — a catastrophe in every sense of the word, exactly as happened in Britain just two days ago.
The rebalancing of scales takes place daily, but this week it happened in certain cities, and in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, for humanity has grown weary of chaos and disorder.
Much has been lost because of neglect and the free rein given to those who wish to celebrate their own freedom and narcissism at the expense of the rights and freedoms of all. And what was the result? The result, regrettably, has been destruction at every level: for the family, for children, for adolescents, for the media, and for politics.
The United Arab Emirates, in the period following the Iranian war against the Gulf states — a period in which nations have been preoccupied with managing their economies, recalibrating their resources and trade routes, and so on — managed to rise to the moment.
It issued its humanitarian, educational, family- and child-supporting decision: a ban on the use of social media by children under the age of 15. Everyone applauded the decision, because it restores dignity to childhood and to children's rights, and restores the role of the family in upbringing and engagement with children, after social media had effectively confiscated that role.
Sport, too — football in particular — restored dignity to human relations, when the world sympathised with the goalkeeper of the Cape Verde national team following his side's draw against Spain. Crowds were moved by the tears of the forty-year-old goalkeeper, to whom the entire world turned as he wept, because his mother had been unable to attend the matches and watch him live the greatest moments of his life. Then, within hours, she arrived in the United States after the US State Department granted her an entry visa, in sympathy with the goalkeeper's situation.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni then restored dignity to women in politics, when she gave as good as she got to the leader of a great power who had said things she found objectionable — indeed, she considered his remarks an insult to herself and to Italy, a country that bows to no one and begs nothing of anyone.