Just look for a minute around you, how many fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds are somewhere around smiling? Not just smiling, dreaming, planning, and falling in love! Yes in love because this is the age love has a meaning. They fall desperately in love; they are ready to go to extremes for love. And their love is not just a boy’s or a girl’s face, their love is towards life!

When you are sixteen you love life so much you are ready to die for it, literally. Because you are sure you can change the world and you can change it …now! How many times have we said that? There are too many things in my life; I have a weak memory but I remember my sixteenth year quite well because it was the period of change, the period of realization and the period of dream walking. I was ready to do anything for love and my biggest love was life, I had already started my travels that a few years later would take me to every single corner of this earth and I had already met people of different cultures and colors. I had sensed unfair and injustice and I had seen poor and hunger. My words were full of passion and not hate, I was ready to fight anything as long I could side the good against evil and this evil had many faces that I realized much later; but that moment for me evil was everything that let people poor, kids without educations and chances in life. War was unfair and greed was unfair.

In my room I had a poster of Che and the coming of a military dictatorship in Greece just made this feeling for freedom, democracy and equality even stronger. But you see I was sixteen. And I was not the only one. Kids from all around the world were feeling exactly the same things didn’t matter if on top of others they had to deal with a dictatorship. When you are sixteen that’s the way you think.

Inspiration when you are sixteen in Europe? Che was definitely one, the forever teenager, the intellectual rebel, and it was May 68 and James Dean and the hippies, Vietnam for USA and Africa for the Europeans colonists. It was Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones but most of all it was Jim Morrison. We want the world and we want it now we were singing, while the world wouldn’t want to let us get any satisfaction! We were sixteen with the small records, does anybody still remember them? We were dancing to The Beatles in parties and staring at the stars dreaming for a future where people colonize the Moon first and then Mars. Yes we were dreaming of things like that, we were dreaming of international government who stops hunger, where money and greed had no room in our society, where everybody was getting equal education and the only thing we really wanted was to explore. Explore the Earth, explore the Moon, and explore philosophy and art. I remember long summer nights in the seaside discovering Nietzsche and Young!

But then just remember; remember all of you when you were sixteen. Fine you didn’t have the Rolling Stones and Jim Morrison but you might had Duran Duran and The Cure or again Elvis Presley singing "Fever". The thing is that doesn’t matter which decade you born and which decade you became sixteen, what really matters here is that when you are sixteen whenever or whatever you born you have, we had all something in common, we were in love. We were in love with life and anything beautiful this life could offer us; and for this love we were ready to sacrifice anything even life herself. Today’s kids are just the same, absolutely the same. They love and they dream, they hate injustice and they want to fight unfair wherever this coming from. They are so romantic, so ready to sacrifice anything and before they become part of the gray reality we are oblige to stand by them just like we were expecting others to do with us, at least understand us when we were sixteen.

I know that most of you are secretly smiling at this moment and are wondering just where this long prologue for sixteen-year-olds is heading. Of course you are aware of the sixteen-year-old soldiers in Africa, of course you are aware of sixteen-year-olds who work like slaves all around the world, but are you aware that there are sixteen-year-old prisoners in Guantanamo? Are you aware that in this prison from hell, hosted by the country that proudly preaches democracy and equality there are prisoners aged sixteen-years-old?

Prisoners that when they were arrested in Afghanistan were much younger? Prisoners held and questioned as terrorists? Did we really forget what it is to be sixteen? Did we really forget what this great terrorist James Douglas Morrison sang back in '68? We want the world and we want it …now! Did we really forget or falling in love with life so much that can sacrifice his life instead of understanding attracts psychological and physical torturing?

What do they expect a sixteen-year-old to confess? That he wants the world and he wants it now? Is this a crime or are they going to lock up all the sixteen-year-olds? Is this how our civilization going to end up, killing the dreams of the sixteen-year-old? If you want to blame somebody find the one who armed the sixteen-year- old and poisoned his mind but don’t kill the future and the hope for change!