The two terminals
Greetings, my dear commie comrades beloved capitalists! A year ago I wrote extensively about November 10, this remarkable date in the most recent history of my country. Since then, I've occupied you with plenty of BG-related stuff, too. In a way, it's fascinating. A country which has gone from communism to capitalism in just a couple of decades. We call it the Transition Period. There are plenty of anecdotes about it, the way they were the only way for self expression during the communist times.
Now it's different. Everyone is free to speak whatever they want. We're nothing like Russia, where a journalist who dares to criticize Dear Leader too much, suddenly disappears. Just on the contrary, we've gone to the other extreme. We whine about anything. We now have a new Dear Leader, and I'm sure he'll be smeared within months (and I have no doubt he deserves it). But that's not the point.
The point is that democracy has both its ups and downs, especially in a country which hasn't had the opportunity to create a stable democratic tradition and a profound understanding of how democracy works. So we learn as we go, on the trial-mistake principle.
What's more, as I've said before, all events from history are subject to very different interpretations, depending on who's talking. The meaning of this day itself has a diametrally different value for the opposing sides (yes, we do have quite a diverse political spectrum here). But whatever the interpretation for November 10, 1989 is, one thing is for sure. It's the day communism went officially kaput here. Just a couple of months later, the first free elections were held. The former Commie, now turned Socialist party, changed its color like a chameleon and took that election. But the avalanche had already begun. What they hoped to postpone with their silent coup against the last commie Dear Leader (the guy with the big ears on the pic, who's looking dumbfounded by the sudden development), inevitably followed a year later when the big crisis struck. 45 years of communism are bound to show their effect on a crumbling system, a stagnating economy, a country drowning in debt, and a society which has no clear vision about its direction.
Those first years were the perfect time for opportunists, Al Capone style thugs getting "the first million that you never ask about" at the tip of their baseball bats. It was a turbulent time of re-distributing the wealth the hard way.
People've grown more cynical over time. Some have become disillusioned and fled the country. More than 1/9 of BG's population now lives abroad (unofficial data). People learned some painful lessons about democracy. First of all, it's not an event. It's a process, which must develop constantly. There are good things and bad things in democracy. There are moments when it's damn weak, seemingly at the brink of collapse. There are many factors working to undermine it. It should be looked after, with the efforts of everyone.
Secondly, democracy is not a final destination, nor a final phase where you get stuck once you reach it. You can't say "Here, we've achieved democracy, let's go have a rest, get some coffee perhaps". Sometimes there are flaws in democracy that we have to work to fix, and sometimes we screw up big time. Nevertheless, people have learned to believe in democracy - they don't see a threat of returning back to totalitarianism any more, although there's still SO much to work on. Moreover there are other stabilizing factors, like our fresh EU membership, and our already established NATO role. No, communism ain't gonna come back, we can sleep calm.
If one could ever sleep calm with the thought that we're still the poorest country in the EU, and we haven't moved that much from where we were in 1990, economy-wise. In fact we're still chasing the pre-90's levels. We lost many markets, and we lost some of our best brains who fled to the West. The risks of free market, I guess.
Most importantly, people discovered their ability to exercise their rights. They were very active politically, especially in the first years of the Transition. They went on the streets, they made protests, strikes, demonstrations. Now they're a bit more passive, maybe because things have settled down, we're "civilized" now, and there are the media and internet of course. If we open any BG forum, we'll see that my people are "experts" in just about anything: from soccer to politics to fashion and showbiz, let alone philosophy (never mind their literacy has been steadily deteriorating over these years). Once having tasted the freedom to speak, they never shut their mouths. They spoke, screamed, shouted freely. That's a freedom that no-one who has never seen real totalitarianism is able to comprehend and appreciate fully. Everyone wanted to exercise that freedom, and so they did - people jumped on demonstrations, they danced and sang and shouted democratic slogans. I jumped for a while too. I even lost my passport on one such "jumping" demonstration (well, I went there for the free rock gig anyway) - the next day a democratic activist came home and brought me my lost passport. Those were the times. People were flying on the wings of enthusiasm.
The old anecdotes, pronounced with half a mouth under the threat of persecution from the communist secret services, had now become a fully fledged satirical industry - people exercised their right to SPEAK every way they could - they wrote columns in newspapers, they talked on radios, and they could just swear at any politician as much as they wanted, without fear.
And despite the enormous difficulties, democracy started to work. And people calmed down. They realized it's of little use to hang around the streets and squares for hours and hours, when you can still exercise your free will on the next elections.
But that was the problem. There were few real options to choose between. In a way, all politicians were the same, just dressed in different colors. Sounds familiar? Yes it is. Because that's how it is in most places.
So here's one anecdote from the Transition era. "There are two ways out of our current predicament: airport Terminal 1 and Terminal 2. Your choice".
Sad but true. That's a pretty new anecdote. The Sofia airport has 2 terminals now (actually tomorrow I'm gonna use #2 to go to Moscow on a biz trip for a couple of days - but then I'm coming back; I must be very dumb, then!) The world has opened and we've opened to the world, but this also means we're now like a broken bucket and the water is leaking through its bottom. The irony is staggering.
Irony, and this cynical feeling of impasse is inherent to Bulgarians. And also devastating self-humor, bordering on auto-nihilism. We're diverse people, because that's how our crossroads geographical location and our extremely complicated history has formed us. But what's most typical of us is, unlike, say, Americans who'd meet their national anthem with a hand on the chest, we'd probably be holding our hands around our waist, just like our soccer players after conceding the N-th goal in their net. ;-) ;-(
21 years ago, November 10 gripped the torpid BG people by the throat and squeezed hard. The endless chain of lazy days and weekends suddenly sped up and started flying at the speed of a rollercoaster. The sand clock was turned around and the sand started falling through the narrow bottleneck. Those who were unlucky were left at the bottom, and others piled up over them, just like in a "financial pyramid" (ie Ponzi scheme, which was much commonplace in those times). Looking back upwards (to their former position), they could only see a narrowing hole behind them. Others got stuck in the bottleneck and they had to wait long for their turn, only to fall down with the rest. Looking back, they could see a vast space full of memories, and a future that looked stuck in a deadlock in the bottleneck, like someone falling over the event horizon of a black hole.
Many now believe that destiny is more powerful than their own capabilities, they've left themselves floating on the surface. In a way people feel they've been more like spectators of their own history, rather than actors, while still having the feeling that they've been squeezed dry by life as if they've gone through a centrifuge. The impression is that forces from outside and from above that are beyond their reach, have been turning the sand clock, and that's not fair.
There are those who "succeeded" of course (whatever that means). The definition of success is different for the Orthodox believer, the capitalist businessman, the parvenu, the immigrant by choice and the immigrant by necessity. All these people and fates deserve their own story, which should probably be written in a book or shown on a movie. It's currently the most fruitful subject, and I'm surprised too little has been told about the Transition era.
Age is also a factor. It was part of the "human potential" during the times of Change. Old age was considered a liability, maturity was a relative advantage, and youth (if you were 20 toward that moment) turned out a heavy existential drama. That's exactly the generation (40 now) who tells the above anecdote about the 2 airport terminals the most often.
A forgotten author, Ortega y Gasset says that history is a chain of eras - the time of the old, followed by the time of the young. When the old dominate, there's stability, but stagnation. And the young provide revolutions, hierarchies crashing down and getting re-arranged, new paradigms are born. Ortega was exactly 40 when he wrote this, and he lived in a depressed Spain just after the end of its colonial glory, a sombre time boiling of dissatisfaction and populated by a multitude of blind minds standing in a dead alley with no way out, all that eventually exploding in the Civil War 1936-39. I don't want to believe this is a viable parallel to my country now. We're much more complacent and conciliatory - that's a legacy from the 500-year long Ottoman rule, when the only way to survive and keep your identity was to lay lower than the grass, not raise your head so it wouldn't get chopped by the sword, and be honest with yourself only in private, whispering things under your breath or not even daring to think them in your head. In a way, we haven't changed much.
The author says that every generation has irreconcilable factions fighting with each other, and a common dilemma which tortures all its contemporaries. Well, the current Bulgarian generation of the 40-s has one dilemma - immigration. There are a million abroad out of 9 million in total, and more are packing up the bags (though there's a tendency of some of them starting to come back, after finding out that the grass in the promised lands is not as green as they imagined).
So that's our tragedy: in an era of youth, a turbulent time of Transition, instead of being creatively bellicose and daring, those few who remained, chose to conform to the old schemes instead. The 40-year olds of today are those who are conducting the debate of communism vs anti-communism, and mostly doing it around the table, drinking rakia and eating Shopska salad, and in those occasions when they were engaged in the ranks of power (like our former prime minister, of the Socialist party), they just tended to take the role of regenerating cosmetics serving the old wrinkled face of the status quo. They were the ones who encouraged such trite phenomena like the common Chalga music, and the ideology of blatant materialism, mindless consumerism and the philosophy of the "bread and circus" now finding its apotheosis in the stupid reality shows (both in the literal, media sense, and IRL).
I'm a bit younger than that particular generation (I'm 32), but I can see this clearly. It was a generation which betrayed its mission to shape our new society with the newly emerging democratic values; Ortega y Gasset has a verdict for those too - "the deserter generation". The deserting took a myriad of forms: mass immigration, silent unsociability, conformism with the inherited habits... We could safely say that the Generation of the Two Terminals initially welcomed democracy with cheers, but it now seldom actually votes, let alone any chances of protesting about anything.
Returning to Ortega, this guy that I've exploited so heavily in this rather lengthy and incoherent rambling, such a "deserter generation" doesn't remain unpunished. It leads a meaningless existence empty of any goals and direction, an existence for its own sake, but under the seemingly calm surface there's a desperate feeling of dissatisfaction with themselves. A feeling that their life is a failure. But let's not disregard all those who succeeded, all the individual triumphs, be they real or illusory; but as a generation overall, those who were young when democracy came here, are now much older than they should be, if you see what I mean.
And let me add that deserting shouldn't be taken as an accusation, because everyone has their own personal motivation to remain passive, or to not fight for a better society, or to simply cut and flee.
The generation of the 40-year old has chosen individual salvation - so typically capitalist! And in a stark contrast (protest?) to the blatant collectivism that reigned for 4 and a half decades before that. It was the Wild Wild West in those first Transition years, in every meaning of the word (including the shootings and bank robberies). Many have jumped off board of the "Bulgaria" ship, some of them reached the promised shores, many others drowned. And those who remained now resemble a bunch of disorganized water-polo players who struggle with both arms and legs to get to the ball inside a swimming pool on board of the cruise ship, their individual efforts not affecting the general course of the ship at all. And I'm not sure even they have any desire to keep trying any more.
It's a lost cause for them. We're next. Maybe we'll play our cards better.
The possible outcomes and the moral dilemmas are always two - whether in the form of two airport terminals, or the hard choice between staying and fighting vs quitting and leaving. The possible ways to achieve either of those are many. But when you pretend to not notice them, the only consolation that remains is in the anecdotes, told around the dining table with a glass of rakia in hand and a fork fiercely scavenging across the dish with the Shopska salad.
Now it's different. Everyone is free to speak whatever they want. We're nothing like Russia, where a journalist who dares to criticize Dear Leader too much, suddenly disappears. Just on the contrary, we've gone to the other extreme. We whine about anything. We now have a new Dear Leader, and I'm sure he'll be smeared within months (and I have no doubt he deserves it). But that's not the point.
The point is that democracy has both its ups and downs, especially in a country which hasn't had the opportunity to create a stable democratic tradition and a profound understanding of how democracy works. So we learn as we go, on the trial-mistake principle.
What's more, as I've said before, all events from history are subject to very different interpretations, depending on who's talking. The meaning of this day itself has a diametrally different value for the opposing sides (yes, we do have quite a diverse political spectrum here). But whatever the interpretation for November 10, 1989 is, one thing is for sure. It's the day communism went officially kaput here. Just a couple of months later, the first free elections were held. The former Commie, now turned Socialist party, changed its color like a chameleon and took that election. But the avalanche had already begun. What they hoped to postpone with their silent coup against the last commie Dear Leader (the guy with the big ears on the pic, who's looking dumbfounded by the sudden development), inevitably followed a year later when the big crisis struck. 45 years of communism are bound to show their effect on a crumbling system, a stagnating economy, a country drowning in debt, and a society which has no clear vision about its direction.
Those first years were the perfect time for opportunists, Al Capone style thugs getting "the first million that you never ask about" at the tip of their baseball bats. It was a turbulent time of re-distributing the wealth the hard way.
People've grown more cynical over time. Some have become disillusioned and fled the country. More than 1/9 of BG's population now lives abroad (unofficial data). People learned some painful lessons about democracy. First of all, it's not an event. It's a process, which must develop constantly. There are good things and bad things in democracy. There are moments when it's damn weak, seemingly at the brink of collapse. There are many factors working to undermine it. It should be looked after, with the efforts of everyone.
Secondly, democracy is not a final destination, nor a final phase where you get stuck once you reach it. You can't say "Here, we've achieved democracy, let's go have a rest, get some coffee perhaps". Sometimes there are flaws in democracy that we have to work to fix, and sometimes we screw up big time. Nevertheless, people have learned to believe in democracy - they don't see a threat of returning back to totalitarianism any more, although there's still SO much to work on. Moreover there are other stabilizing factors, like our fresh EU membership, and our already established NATO role. No, communism ain't gonna come back, we can sleep calm.
If one could ever sleep calm with the thought that we're still the poorest country in the EU, and we haven't moved that much from where we were in 1990, economy-wise. In fact we're still chasing the pre-90's levels. We lost many markets, and we lost some of our best brains who fled to the West. The risks of free market, I guess.
Most importantly, people discovered their ability to exercise their rights. They were very active politically, especially in the first years of the Transition. They went on the streets, they made protests, strikes, demonstrations. Now they're a bit more passive, maybe because things have settled down, we're "civilized" now, and there are the media and internet of course. If we open any BG forum, we'll see that my people are "experts" in just about anything: from soccer to politics to fashion and showbiz, let alone philosophy (never mind their literacy has been steadily deteriorating over these years). Once having tasted the freedom to speak, they never shut their mouths. They spoke, screamed, shouted freely. That's a freedom that no-one who has never seen real totalitarianism is able to comprehend and appreciate fully. Everyone wanted to exercise that freedom, and so they did - people jumped on demonstrations, they danced and sang and shouted democratic slogans. I jumped for a while too. I even lost my passport on one such "jumping" demonstration (well, I went there for the free rock gig anyway) - the next day a democratic activist came home and brought me my lost passport. Those were the times. People were flying on the wings of enthusiasm.
The old anecdotes, pronounced with half a mouth under the threat of persecution from the communist secret services, had now become a fully fledged satirical industry - people exercised their right to SPEAK every way they could - they wrote columns in newspapers, they talked on radios, and they could just swear at any politician as much as they wanted, without fear.
And despite the enormous difficulties, democracy started to work. And people calmed down. They realized it's of little use to hang around the streets and squares for hours and hours, when you can still exercise your free will on the next elections.
But that was the problem. There were few real options to choose between. In a way, all politicians were the same, just dressed in different colors. Sounds familiar? Yes it is. Because that's how it is in most places.
So here's one anecdote from the Transition era. "There are two ways out of our current predicament: airport Terminal 1 and Terminal 2. Your choice".
Sad but true. That's a pretty new anecdote. The Sofia airport has 2 terminals now (actually tomorrow I'm gonna use #2 to go to Moscow on a biz trip for a couple of days - but then I'm coming back; I must be very dumb, then!) The world has opened and we've opened to the world, but this also means we're now like a broken bucket and the water is leaking through its bottom. The irony is staggering.
Irony, and this cynical feeling of impasse is inherent to Bulgarians. And also devastating self-humor, bordering on auto-nihilism. We're diverse people, because that's how our crossroads geographical location and our extremely complicated history has formed us. But what's most typical of us is, unlike, say, Americans who'd meet their national anthem with a hand on the chest, we'd probably be holding our hands around our waist, just like our soccer players after conceding the N-th goal in their net. ;-) ;-(
21 years ago, November 10 gripped the torpid BG people by the throat and squeezed hard. The endless chain of lazy days and weekends suddenly sped up and started flying at the speed of a rollercoaster. The sand clock was turned around and the sand started falling through the narrow bottleneck. Those who were unlucky were left at the bottom, and others piled up over them, just like in a "financial pyramid" (ie Ponzi scheme, which was much commonplace in those times). Looking back upwards (to their former position), they could only see a narrowing hole behind them. Others got stuck in the bottleneck and they had to wait long for their turn, only to fall down with the rest. Looking back, they could see a vast space full of memories, and a future that looked stuck in a deadlock in the bottleneck, like someone falling over the event horizon of a black hole.
Many now believe that destiny is more powerful than their own capabilities, they've left themselves floating on the surface. In a way people feel they've been more like spectators of their own history, rather than actors, while still having the feeling that they've been squeezed dry by life as if they've gone through a centrifuge. The impression is that forces from outside and from above that are beyond their reach, have been turning the sand clock, and that's not fair.
There are those who "succeeded" of course (whatever that means). The definition of success is different for the Orthodox believer, the capitalist businessman, the parvenu, the immigrant by choice and the immigrant by necessity. All these people and fates deserve their own story, which should probably be written in a book or shown on a movie. It's currently the most fruitful subject, and I'm surprised too little has been told about the Transition era.
Age is also a factor. It was part of the "human potential" during the times of Change. Old age was considered a liability, maturity was a relative advantage, and youth (if you were 20 toward that moment) turned out a heavy existential drama. That's exactly the generation (40 now) who tells the above anecdote about the 2 airport terminals the most often.
A forgotten author, Ortega y Gasset says that history is a chain of eras - the time of the old, followed by the time of the young. When the old dominate, there's stability, but stagnation. And the young provide revolutions, hierarchies crashing down and getting re-arranged, new paradigms are born. Ortega was exactly 40 when he wrote this, and he lived in a depressed Spain just after the end of its colonial glory, a sombre time boiling of dissatisfaction and populated by a multitude of blind minds standing in a dead alley with no way out, all that eventually exploding in the Civil War 1936-39. I don't want to believe this is a viable parallel to my country now. We're much more complacent and conciliatory - that's a legacy from the 500-year long Ottoman rule, when the only way to survive and keep your identity was to lay lower than the grass, not raise your head so it wouldn't get chopped by the sword, and be honest with yourself only in private, whispering things under your breath or not even daring to think them in your head. In a way, we haven't changed much.
The author says that every generation has irreconcilable factions fighting with each other, and a common dilemma which tortures all its contemporaries. Well, the current Bulgarian generation of the 40-s has one dilemma - immigration. There are a million abroad out of 9 million in total, and more are packing up the bags (though there's a tendency of some of them starting to come back, after finding out that the grass in the promised lands is not as green as they imagined).
So that's our tragedy: in an era of youth, a turbulent time of Transition, instead of being creatively bellicose and daring, those few who remained, chose to conform to the old schemes instead. The 40-year olds of today are those who are conducting the debate of communism vs anti-communism, and mostly doing it around the table, drinking rakia and eating Shopska salad, and in those occasions when they were engaged in the ranks of power (like our former prime minister, of the Socialist party), they just tended to take the role of regenerating cosmetics serving the old wrinkled face of the status quo. They were the ones who encouraged such trite phenomena like the common Chalga music, and the ideology of blatant materialism, mindless consumerism and the philosophy of the "bread and circus" now finding its apotheosis in the stupid reality shows (both in the literal, media sense, and IRL).
I'm a bit younger than that particular generation (I'm 32), but I can see this clearly. It was a generation which betrayed its mission to shape our new society with the newly emerging democratic values; Ortega y Gasset has a verdict for those too - "the deserter generation". The deserting took a myriad of forms: mass immigration, silent unsociability, conformism with the inherited habits... We could safely say that the Generation of the Two Terminals initially welcomed democracy with cheers, but it now seldom actually votes, let alone any chances of protesting about anything.
Returning to Ortega, this guy that I've exploited so heavily in this rather lengthy and incoherent rambling, such a "deserter generation" doesn't remain unpunished. It leads a meaningless existence empty of any goals and direction, an existence for its own sake, but under the seemingly calm surface there's a desperate feeling of dissatisfaction with themselves. A feeling that their life is a failure. But let's not disregard all those who succeeded, all the individual triumphs, be they real or illusory; but as a generation overall, those who were young when democracy came here, are now much older than they should be, if you see what I mean.
And let me add that deserting shouldn't be taken as an accusation, because everyone has their own personal motivation to remain passive, or to not fight for a better society, or to simply cut and flee.
The generation of the 40-year old has chosen individual salvation - so typically capitalist! And in a stark contrast (protest?) to the blatant collectivism that reigned for 4 and a half decades before that. It was the Wild Wild West in those first Transition years, in every meaning of the word (including the shootings and bank robberies). Many have jumped off board of the "Bulgaria" ship, some of them reached the promised shores, many others drowned. And those who remained now resemble a bunch of disorganized water-polo players who struggle with both arms and legs to get to the ball inside a swimming pool on board of the cruise ship, their individual efforts not affecting the general course of the ship at all. And I'm not sure even they have any desire to keep trying any more.
It's a lost cause for them. We're next. Maybe we'll play our cards better.
The possible outcomes and the moral dilemmas are always two - whether in the form of two airport terminals, or the hard choice between staying and fighting vs quitting and leaving. The possible ways to achieve either of those are many. But when you pretend to not notice them, the only consolation that remains is in the anecdotes, told around the dining table with a glass of rakia in hand and a fork fiercely scavenging across the dish with the Shopska salad.