On Faulty Judgements
In the early 1990s my mom and I were traveling back to Petrozavodsk on a train. We had two beds in a four bed closed compartment. In the middle of the night a really drunk man with two halves of a ticket came in and kept us up all night with stories of times past. Neither we nor the conductors could do anything about it, so we had to listen to him and watch out for our stuff until early morning when he finally passed out. This is probably the reason why I hate when people drink in trains. This is the prelude.
A couple of years ago, my mom, brother, and I were traveling back to Petrozavodsk on a train. Our compartment neighbor was a really shabby old man with a half-liter can of Baltika 9 (the strongest beer you can get) in his hand. Needless to say, I was not excited. But of course I didn’t show it because I’m so well-behaved, and when he asked me to look at his ticket and see if he was on the right seat, I did so. Unfortunately, he was in the right seat. And then he started talking, and I was afraid that my worst fears were coming true. We will probably not be able to sleep with this drunkard around, and he will probably get louder and louder as the night progressed. And how many of those Baltika cans does he have in his grocery bag, which seems to be his only luggage? So I this is what I was thinking as he blabbed to my mom, and then he pulled out a piece of paper and showed it to us. And from that piece of paper with a stamp, signature, and his photo I found out that only two months ago he was released from twenty years of slavery in one of Russia’s southern mountainous regions. He wasn’t able to find his family where he left it and decided to start a new life in the north. He could barely see, and many of his bones were broken. After he finished his Baltika, he laid down on the bunk (he didn’t have the extra money to rent the mattress and pillow), and I saw tears in his eyes - it is unlikely that at that point he has recovered from his enslavement, and maybe he never will.
And you know what? Even if he was a drunkard looking to steal luggage - hey! he’s still a human being. This is something we tend to forget as we accumulate clothes and cool new gadgets.
A couple of years ago, my mom, brother, and I were traveling back to Petrozavodsk on a train. Our compartment neighbor was a really shabby old man with a half-liter can of Baltika 9 (the strongest beer you can get) in his hand. Needless to say, I was not excited. But of course I didn’t show it because I’m so well-behaved, and when he asked me to look at his ticket and see if he was on the right seat, I did so. Unfortunately, he was in the right seat. And then he started talking, and I was afraid that my worst fears were coming true. We will probably not be able to sleep with this drunkard around, and he will probably get louder and louder as the night progressed. And how many of those Baltika cans does he have in his grocery bag, which seems to be his only luggage? So I this is what I was thinking as he blabbed to my mom, and then he pulled out a piece of paper and showed it to us. And from that piece of paper with a stamp, signature, and his photo I found out that only two months ago he was released from twenty years of slavery in one of Russia’s southern mountainous regions. He wasn’t able to find his family where he left it and decided to start a new life in the north. He could barely see, and many of his bones were broken. After he finished his Baltika, he laid down on the bunk (he didn’t have the extra money to rent the mattress and pillow), and I saw tears in his eyes - it is unlikely that at that point he has recovered from his enslavement, and maybe he never will.
And you know what? Even if he was a drunkard looking to steal luggage - hey! he’s still a human being. This is something we tend to forget as we accumulate clothes and cool new gadgets.