We taught them to share - they teach us to be together

At airports across the region, silence is the most common sound today. Not the ordinary, fleeting kind - but the kind that lingers after departures. Young people, with one-way tickets, without much noise, without big words. They just leave.

And perhaps that is the most accurate picture of what we have become.

The generation born at the beginning of the disintegration of the former common state grew up in a reality they did not choose. They learned history from different textbooks, listened to different versions of the truth, and lived within the borders that were always there for them.

Unlike us, they had no illusion of community that they could lose. They only had consequences.

We, who grew up as Tito's pioneers, often like to believe that we were the last generation to know what it meant to live together. But it is equally true that we were also the generation that agreed to lose it - sometimes out of fear, sometimes out of conviction, and often out of helplessness.

Today we live in countries that are politically separate, but fundamentally still depend on the same patterns - division, constant tension and stories of threat. In such an environment, any idea of ​​unity acts either as a weakness or as a threat.

And then Novak Djokovic appears.

Not as a solution, nor as an ideal - but as a reminder that there is a space that politics has not been able to completely close. A space in which people communicate, support each other, understand each other - regardless of borders.

His actions, as well as his reactions to them, are often contradictory. But it is precisely in this contradiction that we see how much the societies we come from are still burdened by the lines we are trying to maintain.

Along with him, a generation is growing up that experiences those lines differently - Ermedin Demirović, Haris Tabaković, Esmir Bajraktarević, Kerim Alajbegović - but also many others.

For them, identity is not necessarily a boundary. More often, it is a combination of birthplace, family stories, languages ​​they speak, and cities they grew up in. In such a world, the divisions that marked previous generations do not carry the same weight.

There are also those before them, like Sergej Barbarez - as a reminder that continuity has not disappeared, but that we often did not recognize it or consciously ignored it.

Perhaps that's why it's wrong to talk about guilt as something that belongs to everyone equally. Some made the decisions. Some followed them. Some tried to avoid them. And some just lived through their consequences.

But the consequences are common.

They do not carry the burden that we, Tito's pioneers, left behind - and which we all carry today, even those who did not choose him. They have no need to prove themselves through divisions. They are what we could have been - if we had chosen courage more often than fear.

Yet, perhaps the most important question is not what we could have been.

Perhaps more important is what else we can become.

Because sport, no matter how burdened with symbols and flags, still remains one of the rare places where rules are understood without translation. Where cooperation makes sense, and the result depends on what we do together.

Unlike the language, which we shared, believing that we would understand each other better that way.

And we didn't.

That's why this is not a story about the past, nor about nostalgia.

This is a matter of choice.

Not big historical decisions, but small, everyday ones - how we look at each other, what we pass on, and whether we will finally admit that those who come may not be undoing us, but rather improving us.

Because, somewhere between departures and occasional returns, between divisions that persist and encounters that nevertheless occur, there remains a space that has not yet been lost.

The only question is - will we recognize it?

* * *

Sometimes I find myself thinking - what if Novak Djokovic, Ermedin Demirovic, Haris Tabakovic, Esmir Bajraktarevic and Kerim Alajbegovic had all stayed here. If they had grown up, studied, created in today's Montenegro.

And then I remember - I'm not here either. I haven't been since 1989.

Maybe that's why these thoughts hurt a little differently.

Not because of the money - although that would be more than enough - but because of the feeling that we haven't lost the most important thing: people.

Because the true wealth of a country is not its borders, flags, or statistics. It is the people who stay. And those who might have stayed - if we had known better.

And we didn't.

And that's why every departure hurts me more than I want to admit. Maybe because in every departure I recognize a part of myself. Every young man who leaves carries with him a part of what we could have been.

And yet, when I see what these people are accomplishing around the world, I can't help but feel a sense of pride. A quiet one, mixed with sadness. Because I know they could have been here - and we could have been different.

Perhaps that is our greatest measure: how many of us are out there, and how many of us are missing here.

That's why I'm not asking for much. Just that those who run this country try to love it the way those who left it love it.

No interest. No division. No fear.

Despite everything, I still believe.

Maybe it's because I'm far away, but never far enough to stop feeling.

I no longer believe in politics as we know it - but I do believe in the people who are coming. In generations who are not burdened by our mistakes, but who, in a way, still correct them.

Maybe that's enough to get you started.

Or maybe I'm just an idealist - someone who still believes, someone who thinks like a cosmopolitan, despite years and experiences that might have taught me otherwise.

But if that's the case, then I also know this: I've always had dreams that I've tried to make come true.

So maybe this one, about unity in Montenegro, will come true one day.

Who knows?

Maybe it's all we have left.

The author is a holder of the Order of Merit for the People of the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesverdienstkreuz); he is the recipient of the "30. September" Plaque, the highest award of the City of Rožaje