“In recent weeks, I have heard several times that we made a green lentil at Žabka stupid,” says councilor and deputy Jan Mikulecký. There is a mess under it, people throw cigarette butts and biscuits through the grate. The grate they walk on is 20 cm above the ground, and after a few days it’s full of garbage beneath it, but is the new lentil really to blame for the mess?
As Jan Mikulecký, a member of the Prague 18 City Council, said not only, Lentilky has changed our old housing estate for the better. We get used to new things very quickly and few people will remember how depressing it was to walk among our blocks of flats last year. A nice environment can quickly turn back into a ghetto if we don’t take care of it and appreciate new things around us. What leads us to leave a box of cigarettes lying on the ground that did not hit the basket?
“At home we go from the living room across the hall to the kitchen to throw away the packaging from chips into sorted waste. But outside we throw away the same bag, even though we are a meter from the trash. Where will it break in us?”, Asks Jan Mikulecký, representative. The mother immediately shouts the little child when she drops a piece of candy on the floor next to the television. “Keep it clean,” we hear as the teenager let the dirty laundry roll around the apartment. But when we walk around the playground, we just mumble under the beard who the hell brought up the youth to make such a mess around us, and we leave the discarded PET bottles lying without a word.
“Our surroundings are really ours and it’s up to us how long it stays nice.” supplies Jan Letlecký, a representative from Letňany. We live here and we create the environment around us. We can make excuses that the city police are missing here, that someone should clean it up every day, but if we behave decently towards our surroundings, we do not need a police or a technical platoon that collects PET bottles around children’s playgrounds every day. Is there really a village to clean up after people all the time? Let’s say it’s from our taxes, but do we really want to spend our taxes for others to clean up after us? We create our surroundings and we can also take garbage, damage and demolish it very quickly.
Photo description: India, Varanasi, holy city, 2013
