There is not much to say when thousands of people take to the streets and express their concern for the conservation of the environment en masse.
Present and future decisions from public thresholds regarding sensitive issues such as ecosystem protection, waste treatment, responsible and orderly urban growth, the challenge of establishing a sustainable tourism model, etc., must be designed and implemented in accordance with the diversity of proposals and approaches from civil society.
It is not about meeting from time to time with a group of neighbors to highlight the four or five initiatives that our public managers have been developing with "care and eagerness" to test the mood of the staff.
It is not about selling what is born from technical offices far from current social realities and subject to demanding administrative procedures.
It is not about fiercely nullifying wills that show other perspectives, other versions, another depth of vision.
It is not about betting on lukewarmness and a stale postmodern populist management dressed in pseudo-ecological humanism.
It is necessary to firmly conceive, to agree on changes in the entrails of the Administration, enabling a structure that can assimilate and address, in acceptable times and with efficiency, the needs, priorities, concerns and contributions that citizens raise about their neighborhood, their municipality, their island...
If we do not encourage that mutual attachment, that affective connection in the key community decisions for the common welfare, the capacity to improve things becomes unfeasible. I sincerely believe that much progress has been made in this aspect. Now public managers usually pass through some forums for debate and reflection. Despite the discomfort caused by the lack of habit, the truth is that a certain open tendency is perceived in favor of these meetings.
However, make no mistake. These "presences" are not occurring due to their insistence or understanding of the "benefits" offered by active listening with citizens. They have been forced to change course due to new communication codes (new technologies) with an immediate impact on people. New codes and tools that, on the other hand, are beginning to be used with perverse effects in terms of an extreme dogmatic polarization where there is no room for spaces tending to welcome the best or most appropriate, without friction, contradictions or pressed ideological loyalties (the anti-such against the anti-so-and-so).
The panic that their lack of solvency will be portrayed on social networks or in some digital media through a committed handful of photos has driven a quantitative leap in the skills related to the "public makeup" of their acts. I assure you that the issue is not approached from ideological paradigms, it basically obeys the convenience of polishing a social marketing strategy. Of course, in political parties there are people with a deep-rooted community awareness who intend to affect realities, who react coherently to contexts of inequalities, etc., but in the relevant frameworks of these organizations the decisions become dense, everything weighs excessively, the consequences are measured with millimetric obsession. Hence the constant incoherence between what I preach and what I move. Hence the urgency to adjust internal slogans, to eliminate the stubbornness of uncomfortable variables. If they lack a democratic belief in the strangers of their operation, how are we going to ask them to listen to us carefully and protect social interests.
I love that we shed the general comfort. That thousands of people have taken to the streets to remember the citizen essence in community (citizen, social being) can only have a positive reading beyond other deeper nuances. I am left wanting to claim the right to participate, to shout latent concerns and claim the ability to define shared horizons. I love that movement, that walk and then we talk about our things. We must value the concern shown through the movement and the reflective, calm and well-armed civic protest in its purposes.
