The culture of a nation is the most important characteristic of all civilizations. Every country or region is proud of some peculiarity of lifestyle and habits of its people, to begin with songs, national costumes and instruments, artists and poets, scientists history, monuments or simply natural beauties.

Why should we be ashamed of our tambura and sopila or of our lace, while the Scottish national prides are pipes and kilts?!!

We maybe not have Notre-dame, but we also have many beautiful churches and there is no such ancient heritage in France, Sweden or in the U. S. as we have in Pula, Split or Dubrovnik. While every tourist can find many praises of Paris in brochures and through conversations with inhabitants, teenagers in Split use their imagination for scratching their names and paltry inscriptions and messages on the walls of Diocletian's Palace, an 1700 years old monument, just to prove their indentity! I wonder what would happen if someone tried that in Schonbrunn or Versailles?

But we just keep on blaming communism for our bad habits, although Croatia has been a democratic country for five years and historically belongs to Western Europe for more than a thousand years. Our kings had strong relationship with popes and other European rulers. This is the evidence that our national celebrities aren't just carousals, swear words and soccer. Lots of people lose their indentity by submission to such groups of people. The teenagers are not divided into groups such as "punkers", "ravers", , etc. - there are also lots of people who do not want to change. It is not a reason that they should be marked as "those /stupid/ people" just becouse they have different visions of having fun. Why should we all be the same?!!

But that Balcan spirit is still present there: uncultivated individuals who destroy books in libraries, furniture in schools and hotels, and that is, of course, the fault of the whole "destructive youth" - which includes all the young let's say between 12 and 20 of age. We shouldn't generalize those problems, we should teach those people to take their responbilities.

Our history, our past and our future are the main reasons to become responsible, for our behaving represents not only our needs, but our readiness to be right inheritors of the Western civilization. The new generations have more power and strength than the old ones, but let us be more refined, because we are not stupid or uncultivated, we just need some more space to get rid of our energy and some more time to find ourselves in the gambling with these capricuous ages. . .

Ana Naglic, III₂