This will be the best summer

This never-ending summer has been a time of laments and litanies. We are more saturated than ever and have protested more than ever. But the gatherings, the demonstrations, the al fresco dinners, and the demands have only served to confirm the abyss between the street and the offices of those who decide about our lives, a gap that began to open legislatures ago and has now reached grandiose dimensions. This is not the land of brave politicians and those who truly command do not usually run in elections.

We know all this. But the loss of democratic quality is not easy to accept. And the processes of de-democratization are silent. To be effective, citizen control must operate with discretion.

The Government repeats to us time and again that it has already taken measures against saturation. But this is not the issue. What we must assess is whether the measures serve any specific purpose, whether they have improved our lives, and whether they have been developed in the service of the citizenry. The answers to these three questions are no, no, and no. The statement could then be reformulated: the Government has wasted time publicizing measures that have revealed their uselessness against saturation.

We have also realized that summer has disappeared as many of us experienced it in the past. We have endured extreme weather conditions and, worst of all, they are the best possible of all the summers to come. It is difficult to imagine what may happen, but we suspect it will be nothing good, while the planes that have to land at our airports and the cars that clog the roads ensure that the emissions festival continues.

We try to be responsible: we recycle, we torture ourselves by using public transport, we look for the local product shelves at the supermarket... Meanwhile, a single private jet arriving from Berlin is responsible for destroying all our effort. We try not to tread water while visitors swim in the pools of the rustic villas they have rented.

The point is that this will be the best summer of all those we will remember when we are about to leave this world. Misfortune knows no bounds, one can always fall lower, one never hits rock bottom. They have taken away our power to force those in charge to change. They do not respect us.