The Donkey Climbing the Stairs

When merit isn't enough

Every society teaches its children that ability matters.

Work hard. Prepare yourself. Do your best. If you are good enough, you will have a chance.

Then, sooner or later, many of us discover the uncomfortable truth: merit can open a door, but it does not always decide who gets through it.

Sometimes the door opens for the person who knows someone.

Sometimes it stays closed for the person who was better prepared.

Sometimes the rules are followed exactly as written—and yet the outcome still feels profoundly unfair.

That realization can arrive early in life. Mine did.

I was eight years old.

The story behind the poem

Two boys I knew had attended the same school. Both were capable and well prepared. One had connections that helped him move forward and eventually reach the Military Academy in Modena.

The other was rejected during the selection process after a medical examination identified a physical problem.

What stayed with me was not simply that one succeeded and the other failed.

It was the suspicion that the difference between them had not been their ability.

If someone cannot defeat you on preparation, there is always another way to stop you.

I was only eight, so I had no vocabulary for what I was witnessing. I didn't know about cronyism, patronage, social networks, or what I would later call relational capital.

I only knew that something wasn't right.

Years later, that memory became the starting point for the first poem I ever wrote: The Donkey Climbing the Stairs.

The title came from the absurdity of the image itself: a donkey somehow climbing stairs while someone who actually knows how to climb is left behind.

Injustice becomes different when it happens to someone you know

As a child, I had already been deeply disturbed by images of historical violence.

I remember seeing films depicting the massacres of Native Americans by the U.S. cavalry. I remember images of Nazi concentration camps and the horrors inflicted on prisoners.

Those events were immense. They belonged to history, to distant places and distant generations.

But the story of those two boys was different.

It wasn't history.

It was my world.

I knew the boy who moved forward. I knew the boy who was stopped.

That makes injustice harder to look away from.

Perhaps this is where our sense of justice really begins—not with political theory or moral philosophy, but with the first moment when we look at something happening in front of us and instinctively think:

This is not right.

Privilege rarely looks dramatic

As I grew older, I realized that favoritism does not always announce itself with a major political scandal or a coveted public job.

Sometimes it is much smaller.

A connection that moves someone ahead on a waiting list.

A phone call that gets an appointment sooner.

A professional who makes an exception.

A favor that is quietly returned.

A door that opens because someone knows the person on the other side.

None of these things, taken separately, seems capable of changing a society.

But societies are not shaped only by spectacular acts of corruption.

They are also shaped by thousands of ordinary exceptions.

The problem begins when the formal rules remain equal while access to those rules becomes unequal.

The law may be the same for everyone. The path through it may not be.

The child who wanted justice

When I wrote The Donkey Climbing the Stairs, I had no theory of power.

I wasn't trying to explain Italian society.

I wasn't writing about political parties or ideology.

I was simply trying to give a shape to something that had disturbed me as a child.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder how much of that eight-year-old boy is still inside me.

Because growing older changes our relationship with justice.

Children tend to believe that if something is wrong, someone should fix it.

Adults learn that the world is much harder to repair.

We discover that injustice is not an exception to human history. It is one of its recurring features.

We discover that we cannot fight every battle.

And eventually we face a more uncomfortable question:

What do you do when you realize that the world will not necessarily become fair?

The Zealot, the Pharisee, and the Sadducee

I have sometimes imagined three possible answers.

The first is the Zealot: the person who continues fighting injustice wherever he encounters it, regardless of the personal cost.

The second is the Pharisee, in my own contemporary interpretation of the figure: someone who publicly presents himself as a defender of justice, but may eventually turn that struggle into a career, a social identity, or a source of power.

And then there is the Sadducee.

The Sadducee, as I imagine him, has a different ambition.

He doesn't want to save the world.

He wants to reach a position where the world can no longer determine his fate.

He settles his own grievances. He secures his own position. He makes himself sufficiently strong, connected, or independent that he no longer needs society to be fair to him.

There is something undeniably cynical about that position.

But it raises an uncomfortable question:

Is open self-interest more honest than pretending that personal ambition is a universal cause?

I don't have a final answer.

Perhaps because I still contain all three figures.

The child who wanted justice.

The adult who understands power.

And the man who sometimes wonders whether the safest way to escape injustice is not to defeat it, but to become strong enough that it can no longer reach you.

What happens when justice is no longer guaranteed?

Maybe growing up does not mean losing our belief in justice.

Maybe it means discovering that justice is not guaranteed.

From there, people choose different paths.

Some keep fighting.

Some adapt.

Some enter the system hoping to change it.

Some enter the system because they want a share of its advantages.

And some eventually decide that their only realistic goal is to protect themselves.

I still don't know which path I will ultimately take.

But I know where the question began.

It began with two boys.

One kept climbing.

The other was stopped.

And somewhere behind that memory is an eight-year-old child who did not yet know the words clientelism, privilege, or relational capital.

He didn't need them.

He only needed to see an injustice.

And perhaps that is the strange thing about growing older:

we spend years learning the language to describe what a child can recognize in a single moment.