Dear Union,
I'm writing to you with a bitter taste in my mouth and my gaze fixed on a glimpse of our splendid Cagliari, a stone's throw from the city center, which every weekend transforms into the scene of a sad paradox.
On Friday and Saturday nights, this little square fills with young people. They laugh, shout, argue, and fight with that exuberance that, at a young age, should help build a future, but instead is drowned in alcohol. Carefree kids, sure, but completely oblivious to this and those around them. Then, when it's time to move on to the nightlife, they get up and, often staggering, leave.
What they leave behind, however, hurts the heart.
Empty glass bottles, crushed cans, plastic cups scattered across the steps and pavement. And here lies the most distressing paradox: the trash can is right there, exactly one step away from them. Just a few centimeters away. All it would take is a simple, civilized gesture, a stretch of arm. But no. They don't care.
Every single week the scene repeats itself identically, like a ritual of superficiality.
The spontaneous reflection isn't just an indictment of individual rudeness, but an open wound to huge issues: civic education and collective responsibility. How can we turn a blind eye to young people who now seem to only know how to have fun by numbing themselves?
Cheap alcohol and its easy availability are the trigger, but the lack of respect for public property and one's city is the real pitfall. Respect isn't magically learned at eighteen; it's cultivated in the family, at school, on the street.
Seeing those bottles abandoned on the steps, just a stone's throw from the trash can, doesn't just show a waste left on the ground: it shows a generation that perhaps no one is teaching that caring for what surrounds us means, first and foremost, caring for ourselves and others.
A disheartened reader
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