Civic-mindedness, scoundrels, and detached individuals

Barcelona City Council has launched a civic responsibility campaign with a very direct and decidedly unfriendly message. It says that people who urinate in the street or litter are shameless. And I would go further: vandals, like those who deface bus stops; or freeloaders, like those who don't pay on the metro.

But since cities are an accurate social thermometer, it is clear that incivility has long since ceased to be just a phenomenon caused by bad manners: it has much more to do with the number of people who feel disconnected from everything.

I see it every day: many of those who urinate between dumpsters aren't drunken tourists on a stag do who've been turned away from Barcelona because they've come to relieve themselves, but rather people who sleep on the streets, often the same ones who shuffle dumpsters and trash cans because they don't use them to put things in, but to take them out. Much of the cardboard littering the streets has been left by supermarket or restaurant workers who haven't had a boss to tell them where everything should go. The toilet bowls that "decorate" the streets have been taken down by construction workers, who want to get rid of them without the people who pay them having bothered to find out where they'll take what they take from their homes.

Are there scoundrels? Of course, I see them every day. Have we lost sight of what we used to be taught at home? Absolutely. But every day there are more people in cities who feel completely detached from the rules. Because they live in a vacant lot or under a balcony, because they have enough work in their lives, because they've just arrived, or because they think, why should they care about anything if no one cares about them?