Paris Demetriades
It’s hard for me to imagine, in the island country we live, any other place where almost every social layer meets, coexists, and perhaps inevitably interacts and comes into contact as they do on our beaches during the summer season.
Sure, you might find some crowds in air-conditioned malls, but that's within a strictly consumerist framework, narrower and decidedly more miserable. Without a doubt, it’s on the beaches every summer where the famous “popular pilgrimage” takes place.
When it comes to the painful saga of our town centers, perhaps it’s best if we say no more. The only ones that genuinely function as such and attract a satisfactory number of people are the seaside squares. This fact probably shouldn’t surprise anyone in a country where the private car remains the undisputed ruler, and where adequate urban green space somehow continues to be a matter of nuclear or even quantum physics.
Thus, as the only gathering point for such a heterogeneous crowd, our beaches can offer some potentially useful insights into our characteristics as a people. The most important and obvious question to ask is whether this social coexistence occurs in a harmonious and smooth way, with… mutual respect for everyone’s differences, or whether the opposite is observed. I believe that anyone who has spent even one day, especially on the popular beaches of our island, where mass crowds gather, won’t need much time to realize the harsh reality: there is usually no genuine empathy and no respect for the person who just happened to want to enjoy their swim beside us.
The most telling example of all is noise pollution, regardless of the source: Whether it’s a seaside bar that arbitrarily and due to lack of effective legislation believes the coastline belongs to it and bathers kilometers away must listen to its music, or a small group, even a single person sometimes, who thinks it’s perfectly fine to come down to the beach with loudspeakers blasting their choice of music. The idea that we should consider there are other people around with possibly different musical tastes is hardly ever the norm.
Football, paddle ball, and other popular sports both in and out of the water probably offer another telling case study of whether we respect the fact that we are not alone on the beach or not. Not to mention the legislative violations that have become the norm, which theoretically foresee, only on paper, that the entire coastline, without exceptions, is public, that sunbeds should occupy only 50% of the beach, and that forcing people to buy food and drink exclusively from one business is illegal.
Last but certainly not least, the trash: No matter how many bins a beach has or how color-coded they are, if the municipal authorities don’t hurry every morning to clean thoroughly, the sight will be at best disheartening and, unfortunately, a very telling reflection of our culture.
This opinion was translated from its Greek original.
