Pothole Country

6/12/2018

Italy has been a truly pothole country this year after the rains. The roads are in horrible conditions. Here is the road that I drive through every day four times taking my daughter to school:

This is the state of the roads in Rome- a capital city of a G7 country!

Cars need to drive in the middle of the road in order to avoid the holes... which in turn puts us at risk of an accident

Cars need to drive in the middle of the road in order to avoid the holes... which in turn puts us at risk of an accident. As logically, the car coming from the other side is doing the same thing: driving to avoid the holes and not being able to pay attention to the car coming on to them!

Notice how the signs are propped up. By a sandbag!

Oh, the municipality has taken great care to put up warning signs that the roads are bad.: As if we don't know the roads we drive on every day!

Yeah sure, non-locals need to be warned. Mind you, the roads do not need to be fixed!
They have been like this for 9 months now. And God knows how long they will be like this. I have forced my husband to call the responsible department many times to remind them of their duty, to no avail. They say they'll be calling back, they simply don't. You call again. You again cannot get in hold of the person in charge. It is a tactic to make you give up. Happy you if you have people in charge who work for you. And lucky you of course.

A neighbor got her car rods broken while driving. She reported to the municipality, to make a claim. What was their answer?
      "There is a sign there, you should have been driving at 30 km/hr."

Oh I know... There will be people who take the side of the municipality now. My answer to those would be:
      I pay taxes to be so insolently scolded that I wasn't driving at the speed limit and I am responsible for the damage caused to my car?? Come again?!
      I also urge you to drive at 30 km/hr to just have a grasp of what that speed means. Now imagine driving on an empty road at that speed for 10 kilometers four times a day every day, or better yet, do that yourself; only then you have a right to say anything on the matter.

Or in this case, believing that paying taxes gets you public services... Oh yes, of course, there are always the next elections, where you can change the people in charge. You change a bunch of crappy people with other crappy people and keep feeding them with your taxes. Ah... Of course you'll need to wait for 4 years until the next elections to change these crappy people. If the next bunch is crappy too, you grit your teeth, bite the bullet and bear it for 4 more years. Or of course you have an alternative: You can put your efforts into making them do the job you are paying them to do, you can campaign in your community to put pressure on these people so that they do what they are paid to do. You leave all other things you need to do in your life and put all your efforts there... with the hope that you might get them to do what you are paying them to do. Sure, that's a solution too. Or as it is in fact not a feasible solution, you learn to accept things the way they are and give up on any progress. See how such things make you gain wisdom! Yeah... Leads you only to fatalism, not to proper function of public services.

Their solution is simple. They have warned you. There is a sign there saying you should be driving 30 km/hr.

Yeah yeah, it's not their duty to fix the roads, you drive at 30 km/hr, problem solved!

Ah, but we are still obliged, at the point of their gun, to pay taxes. What do we pay taxes for? Come again?!... I pay taxes to drive on such roads?

As they believe they are not obliged to fix the roads and putting up such a sign absolves them of their duty... I will be doing the same thing. I will be filing a document declaring that "Unless the roads are fixed, I am not going to be paying my taxes next time."

This is my declaration here too. So that the web is a witness to my protest and serves as evidence in court if they ever come to get me to put in jail or take any action to confiscate my property to make me pay by their brute force.

Come on people, SPEAK UP! We are insulted with our own monies. We are bullied. This is unacceptable. Let's claim where our monies go. Let us be the ones who dictate where our monies go. We are the ones paying the piper, we should get to play the tunes. The tax system needs to be overhauled and changed completely.

I am not necessarily against taxes, but I am DEFINITELY against paying taxes when I have no say over how my tax monies are to be spent. The 5 per thousand in Italy, where you get to choose which organization your tax money goes to has to be made 100 %. No conditions on it.

Before

After- See the wonderful difference!

They came and "fixed" the road in the above photo! As if to mock us! They shouldn't have bothered at all if this was what they could do! To add insult to injury, they lay down proper asphalt on roads that do not need it.