The silence of the innocents.
There’s a film with this title, and for many it evokes horror. But real horror rarely makes noise. It creeps in quietly, in the folds of things left unsaid, in the empty chairs, in the questions we keep putting off to a tomorrow that never comes. The silence of the innocents, today, is not a plot. It is a condition. It is that of a generation that has stopped claiming its place, and that risks noticing only once someone else has already taken it.
I write this without any pretence of lecturing, because politics teaches, above all, the humility of knowing how easy it is to get things wrong. But I write it with a conviction that the years have not worn away: the future of young people, in this country, too rarely enters the rooms where things that matter are decided. It appears on agendas as a belated afterthought, in party manifestos as a chapter tacked on at the end, once the space has already been spent elsewhere. We fill our mouths with bonuses, incentives, small measures that look more like a pat on the cheek than a real answer. But the real issue — what jobs, what housing, what life, and above all what room in the halls where decisions are made — that is always discussed in a whisper, and always too little.
Yet one only has to look beyond our borders to see that something is stirring. In Tirana, since the end of May, thousands of young people have returned to the squares every evening. They called it the Flamingo Revolution: peaceful, without party banners, made up of twenty- and thirty-somethings who have stopped accepting as a natural disaster what is, in fact, a political choice. It is not an isolated case. In Nepal, a generation that no one was listening to filled the streets until it forced the government to step back. In Serbia, university students led one of the largest mobilisations in the recent history of the Balkans, halting what had seemed already decided. From Madagascar to Peru, the same question has crossed different continents: what if it didn’t have to go this way? It is the most subversive question there is, because it challenges the idea that someone else always gets to write your destiny.
But there is a lesson in those squares worth taking to heart. None of them was born out of nothing, and none lasted by chance. Where young people have truly made a difference, they did so because they organised: into movements, networks, communities capable of holding together both anger and a plan. A protest that stays solitary fades away in a single evening; one that becomes a movement changes a country’s agenda. This is the step I ask of San Marino’s young people: outrage alone is not enough — you must come together. Give yourselves a name, a voice, a shape. Make yourselves heard together, because together you cannot be ignored.
A few weeks ago, just a few kilometres from here, at the Meeting of Rimini, Pope Leo XIV spoke words that seem written for this very moment: “We need courageous pioneers, who begin with their own change of course to make the conversion demanded of everyone convincing and credible.” And addressing young people directly, he added: “You are a sign that the future is a promise, not a threat. Get involved!” This is not a call to revolt, but something more demanding: it is a call to a responsibility that cannot be delegated.
In San Marino, that call is slow to be answered. So allow me to make it myself, to my peers, to those who are twenty and to those who are thirty. Your life, your work, your desire to take part, the economy in which you will try to build something: all of this is being decided right now. And if you don’t take charge of it, others will. Not out of malice, but by the simple law that politics fills every void it is left with. Every assembly skipped, every vote not cast, every silence: it is the future changing hands.
I am not asking you to trust. I am asking you to show up. To be, yourselves, those courageous pioneers. To demand that your needs are not a footnote but a priority, and that space in politics is not granted to you out of kindness, but claimed as a right. Silence is the only thing that those who hold power do not truly fear. Break it. Not tomorrow. Now.
Lorenzo Bugli
