I have a very ambiguous relationship with patriotism and my country.
I am bugged when people discriminate Romanians just because they come from 'a chip off the old Soviet block, used to get up early in the morning singing patriotic songs and peppy reporting of false improvements'. Pardon my French, but up yours, orright?
I am equally bugged when Romanians consider themselves as the perpetual victims of history. History is what you make of it, but if you just let it happen, you have no one but yourself to blame.
I am known to speak not exactly kindly of my country. There are many, many flaws and it really breaks my heart to see good things go uselessly to waste.
Nevertheless, there were three occasions when I was proud of my country. I am not referring to sporting events or such. There were three times when the elections were not won by the PSD. First time, I, along with many others, naively thought that things will change. Nothing changed. The second time, cautious after the first major disappointment, we voted for change again and got it. Things changed some, but not always for better. Now, yesterday, it was the third time we voted for change and the third time we won - marginally (50.37%), but we did win.
I am strangely proud. Proud that against the media manipulations of the last years, blatant and shameless and obvious, history got to repeat itself. Last time the exit polls were ordered to show a different winner, and the victory speeches were embarrassingly loud and brash from the party that proved to be on the losing side.
I was afraid yesterday, watching the national television, that this time the horrific pictures could be true. Today I am glad that social-democrats, liberals and the other morons, plus the moguls behind them, get to choke back on their words.
It is a bid sad that the people actually living in Romania get to be so easy to be fooled around. There was a documentary on Arte that is refreshingly unpointing fingers at anyone. Although I suspect whom the maker voted with. But still, one very sad conclusion is that the most lucid of them all appears to be Dan Diaconescu, the guy who invented OTV, a controversial and very looked-down upon TV channel. He says that people who live there are numb, manipulated by the media, because in Romania, TV is everything (oh, so very true!), and that those who get disappointed, they emigrate. No fancy words, no nifty sketches, no chest pounding. Sad.
Another sad thing is that almost 50% of Romanian voted for someone whom they call 'the village idiot'. And the diaspora vote was needed to tip down the scales.
I know those who disagree with me think that I am petty being so 'involved' in politics. Being on the winning side here, I can agree to disagree.
It is not that I am bursting with pride. I do not think that things will be radically different from now on. I do not believe that the current president is Prince Charming on a white horse who is going to fix everything. But I am glad that he has the chance to at least try to make things a bit different. And I have to admit that getting to see the looting bunch from PSD and the rest making fools of themselves does make my day.
On this note, I may add that more good news are more than welcome!
Showing posts with label communism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label communism. Show all posts
Monday, December 7, 2009
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Latest Lazlo's lament - end of a generation
Pre Scriptum: I wrote this post last week. I intended to edit it further. I no longer feel like. So here it is.
So, as I have said before, my friend laments the end of a generation that was before his. Apparently, Clint Eastwood's latest movie deals precisely with this topic. I did not have a chance to see it, it hasn't come here yet.
But this is too good a topic for me to pass on. Especially since the old generations dying in the corner of the world I come from have things in common and things that set them apart from the old generations that die out in the US.
The sense of right and wrong, the responsibility of doing the proper thing, the sense of community and family, the sense of shame (which I have to say that nowadays is almost completely lost), these are common on both sides of the pond.
Nevertheless, the old generations from Eastern Europe differ from the Western world, and this major difference comes from the long reign of communism in that part of the Earth. Here I must confess something: I am very sick and tired of talking and hearing about the "plague of communism", I lived 17 years in the post-"revolutionary" Romania and heard almost everything there was to be said about communism, not to mention having lived for 14 years the plague itself.
Still, despite this sickness and tiredness, I realize how people who have not lived it, share my feelings towards such discussion, but in fact have no clue about what communism was or felt like. Here I include people from capitalist countries and people born in the 90s.
I do not intend to get into the details of how it was to live in fear of making the wrong joke about you-know-who, you had to be rather stupid to make jokes like that in a inadvisable company, and traitors have been around and even took friendly forms since the beginning of time. I will only remind the following: seeing oranges and bananas once a year (the lucky ones, I mean); having the right to buy one half of loaf of bread per day, one kilo of sugar and one liter of oil per month; having loads of shops with nothing in them (literally, food stores with empty shelves); the cold that froze the crummy apartments in gray blocks of flats (which still stand); the abortion decree that was valid for some 20 years and led to almost an entire generation of unwanted children, starved for food and love; the entire network of lies that made up our lives at the time... These lies are the ones that affected us most. They took out the friggin' F out of LIFE and made it a plain LIE. These lies shaped so much the mentality of parents and children that they became a way of living. And now, people cannot tell the real from the fake, they keep waiting for the State to help them out, they still follow the same adagio of "we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us".
This is why the older generation saw its principles twisted and ended up bringing up many younger generations in pretty much the same way. Now we witness "evil and fake" inherited and passed on, in improved ways, from father to son. The generation that held on to their beliefs and minded their business and tried to do right was beaten up and shackled to the ground. It was an obvious conclusion that having principles was not really useful.You could get by easier if you did not have them. So it is easy to understand the erosion of the family and community, of the moral rules of conduct, process that unfortunately takes less time than one might imagine.
And when there aree nincompoops breeding, we can't really expect too much, can we now?! But in this respect, I couldn't really tell the difference between former-communist nincompoops and capitalist nitwits. Because, at the end of the day, the problem is the same: generations of youngsters more able to socialize online than in person, who think that school is for morons and milk comes from the microwave, who want all rights and no obligation. More frightening is that they believe that their chance in life is winning American Idol or America's Next Topmodel or Bachelor or any other similarly contest. Not that I don't watch some of these shows, I do. But there are very few who have talent and deserve a chance at fame, and a whole lot of the contestants just make pathetic fools of themselves. And they are the ones who grow up thinking thin is beautiful, rich is happy and brand is life. Which, in my old fashion opinion, is wrong.
Thankfully, I have succeeded in life in making friends with like-minded people who give me back the hope that I am not completely right. And if this group of friends exist, then maybe we are not alone. Maybe it is just the media's fault, people are just people as they have always been, only that now we are being repeatedly told about the human nature. Maybe shallowness is more often met than we would like. Maybe, with this overpopulation, this is just nature's mechanism to regulate this issue, cretins are to be eliminated just like bad skin peeling away after an overexposure to the sun. Maybe this is just my wishful thinking.
Nevertheless, despite my pessimism (which I like to call realism, because whenever something good could happen, it rarely does, and when something bad could happen, then it will almost surely will - little theory that saves me heartbreak sometimes), I want to believe that each generation has something good in it, even though we might not always know what. And I firmly believe that life always compensates everything, even though we might not want or like. This is why I trust the superior authority on this. From what I read and watched in the movies, I think I would have liked the 20s and its folies. From what I have lived, now it's not that bad either after all. Just do the Monty Python thing.
So, as I have said before, my friend laments the end of a generation that was before his. Apparently, Clint Eastwood's latest movie deals precisely with this topic. I did not have a chance to see it, it hasn't come here yet.
But this is too good a topic for me to pass on. Especially since the old generations dying in the corner of the world I come from have things in common and things that set them apart from the old generations that die out in the US.
The sense of right and wrong, the responsibility of doing the proper thing, the sense of community and family, the sense of shame (which I have to say that nowadays is almost completely lost), these are common on both sides of the pond.
Nevertheless, the old generations from Eastern Europe differ from the Western world, and this major difference comes from the long reign of communism in that part of the Earth. Here I must confess something: I am very sick and tired of talking and hearing about the "plague of communism", I lived 17 years in the post-"revolutionary" Romania and heard almost everything there was to be said about communism, not to mention having lived for 14 years the plague itself.
Still, despite this sickness and tiredness, I realize how people who have not lived it, share my feelings towards such discussion, but in fact have no clue about what communism was or felt like. Here I include people from capitalist countries and people born in the 90s.
I do not intend to get into the details of how it was to live in fear of making the wrong joke about you-know-who, you had to be rather stupid to make jokes like that in a inadvisable company, and traitors have been around and even took friendly forms since the beginning of time. I will only remind the following: seeing oranges and bananas once a year (the lucky ones, I mean); having the right to buy one half of loaf of bread per day, one kilo of sugar and one liter of oil per month; having loads of shops with nothing in them (literally, food stores with empty shelves); the cold that froze the crummy apartments in gray blocks of flats (which still stand); the abortion decree that was valid for some 20 years and led to almost an entire generation of unwanted children, starved for food and love; the entire network of lies that made up our lives at the time... These lies are the ones that affected us most. They took out the friggin' F out of LIFE and made it a plain LIE. These lies shaped so much the mentality of parents and children that they became a way of living. And now, people cannot tell the real from the fake, they keep waiting for the State to help them out, they still follow the same adagio of "we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us".
This is why the older generation saw its principles twisted and ended up bringing up many younger generations in pretty much the same way. Now we witness "evil and fake" inherited and passed on, in improved ways, from father to son. The generation that held on to their beliefs and minded their business and tried to do right was beaten up and shackled to the ground. It was an obvious conclusion that having principles was not really useful.You could get by easier if you did not have them. So it is easy to understand the erosion of the family and community, of the moral rules of conduct, process that unfortunately takes less time than one might imagine.
And when there aree nincompoops breeding, we can't really expect too much, can we now?! But in this respect, I couldn't really tell the difference between former-communist nincompoops and capitalist nitwits. Because, at the end of the day, the problem is the same: generations of youngsters more able to socialize online than in person, who think that school is for morons and milk comes from the microwave, who want all rights and no obligation. More frightening is that they believe that their chance in life is winning American Idol or America's Next Topmodel or Bachelor or any other similarly contest. Not that I don't watch some of these shows, I do. But there are very few who have talent and deserve a chance at fame, and a whole lot of the contestants just make pathetic fools of themselves. And they are the ones who grow up thinking thin is beautiful, rich is happy and brand is life. Which, in my old fashion opinion, is wrong.
Thankfully, I have succeeded in life in making friends with like-minded people who give me back the hope that I am not completely right. And if this group of friends exist, then maybe we are not alone. Maybe it is just the media's fault, people are just people as they have always been, only that now we are being repeatedly told about the human nature. Maybe shallowness is more often met than we would like. Maybe, with this overpopulation, this is just nature's mechanism to regulate this issue, cretins are to be eliminated just like bad skin peeling away after an overexposure to the sun. Maybe this is just my wishful thinking.
Nevertheless, despite my pessimism (which I like to call realism, because whenever something good could happen, it rarely does, and when something bad could happen, then it will almost surely will - little theory that saves me heartbreak sometimes), I want to believe that each generation has something good in it, even though we might not always know what. And I firmly believe that life always compensates everything, even though we might not want or like. This is why I trust the superior authority on this. From what I read and watched in the movies, I think I would have liked the 20s and its folies. From what I have lived, now it's not that bad either after all. Just do the Monty Python thing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)