Page 83 - Supplemento 2-2016 (ENG)

Tackling Environmental Crime throUgh standardized Methodologies

It is important to support and reinforce this law because every property
confiscated and given back to the community is, indeed, a slap to the organised
crime but it is mainly a victory of the State, which is not to be seen just as the
set of institutions. Rather, it is, before anything else, the agreement of respon-
sibility connecting the citizens of a country. As a result, those cooperatives ope-
ned by means of a public call – tools for work and for human and cultural deve-
lopment for thousands of young people – are the tangible proof that sharing
responsibility and continuity of such a commitment are the requirements for
the a change.

The strength of young people

My final point: young people. In Italy there are ten million young people
below the age of 18. For every hundred 14 year-old youngsters there are one
hundred over 65 adults. Our society is getting older and older and 36.9% of the
young population is unemployed. I’m afraid a country that doesn’t invest in the
young generation is a country that doesn’t believe in itself: youngsters are not
our future, they are our present.

We must give value to them, support and accompany them. We must put
them in the conditions to realise their ambitions. For a young person there is
nothing more discouraging than feeling the object of non-kept promises.
Nothing is more humiliating than seeing their aspirations trapped within a
system that doesn’t take into account equal opportunities and transparency, but
is based on privilege and external backing. Every day I experience personally
the passion of young people.

When young people receive adequate value, are made responsible or just
left in the conditions to do something, their reaction is extraordinary. Their
creativity, hunger of knowledge, application to study and research, skills in the
new technologies are also extraordinary. For young people the most thrilling
challenge is to put themselves at the service of life and not life at the service
of themselves. All this because young people know, actually they “feel” it befo-
re others, the message of an African proverb: “One cannot dance stepping on
other people’s feet”.

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