Magnificent. Depressing. Ugly. Most Beautiful - all rolled into one

Yesterday a two-minute reference to the social situation in Greenland in a Danish popular series pushed me into thinking about the present-day Russia.

In the above-mentioned episode a Danish Prime Minister was visiting Greenland following a US-influenced internal conflict. After some emotional conversations Greenlandic Premier took the representative of a dominion oppressor to face the evidence of the indelible political wrongs accumulated by centuries by meeting Greenlanders. On the background of the benumbed and frosted graveyard stubbed by numerous white impersonal crosses on the most breathtaking landscape of snowy and mountainous Greenland, the following conversation evolved:

"Our biggest problem that we are going to die out as people. The birth rate is dropping. Our young people leave Greenland. But the worst thing is skyrocketing suicide rate - all the young men are killing themselves."

"What have you done about it?"

"We have tried almost everything: suicide hotlines, psychologists, anti-depressants, but it's just getting worse. 20% of Greenlandic youths have tried to commit suicide. It's a tragic world record." 

"Why is this, do you think?" 

"Suicide have always been a part of our culture. People threw themselves off a mountain, which was called "the place where you fall down". But they were old people who had become a burden to their families. Back then a suicide was an act of pride. Maybe our young commit suicide because they take pride in nothing. Why do Greenlanders drink? Why our children are abused? People have forgotten who they are." 

Right there, thunderstruck by these words my mind instantaneously beamed out a parallel to the realities of my life:

In Russia, the turbulent 90s swept away seventy years of stability and unyielding routines with the last decades of pure stagnation. If we think of the country and political decisions in terms of its people, one can easily imagine what a personal catastrophe of enormous proportions almost everyone was undergoing: my grandmother, my parents, we, children at that time, who could not understand why mother was taking heart drops and father was lying in bed for days.

Now my grandmother warmly remembers the hardest years of her life, which include no less than famine, war and the death of children. My parents, as well as the whole generation at the time being in their forties, have never really adapted and recovered in their new life. As a child I spent all my free time outside, running and playing in the streets of a big city, nowadays very few parents will let their children or even teenagers out alone after six.

The birth and death rates have just broke even in 2012 after plummeting down for years, the average life expectancy is 67 years: 76 for women and 63 for men. Almost world's lowest population growth. Almost all of my students left to the capitals or abroad after their graduation. "But the worst is the skyrocketing suicide rate - the young people are killing themselves" - just to rephrase the Greenlandic fictional character's grave words. I am not mentioning alcoholism, drugs and abuse just to keep a live analogy.

The change as rapid and fast could not fail to provoke fatal repercussions, damaging the whole generation, which could not withstand its magnitude and force, irreversibly changing the future of once a great country. Therefore, we are where we are: old values have been washed away, the new valor impositus and freedoms have grown as mutants. Hence, drugs, drinking, abuse, mortality, suicides, in other words: "we take pride in nothing, we have forgotten who we are".

As I was watching the episode on, the hope glimpsed for a short moment:

"I have a plan for my country. If I am to succeed, we must give our people back their self-respect. I want suicide rate to drop. Let Greenlanders have a say in the major issues." 

"Political security matters and foreign affairs?"

"But you cannot let us, can you?"... 
...

When the Danish PM returned home, she talked to her husband:

"How was Greenland?" 

"It was magnificent. It was depressing  Ugly. I think it's the most beautiful place I have ever seen. All rolled into one." 

And within that brief moment I realised - that's exactly how I feel about my country: Magnificent. Depressing. Ugly. Most Beautiful - all rolled into one.

"...and no worries either"

Source of picture and an interesting blog as well

"...and no worries either", as my moderately handsome husband added :-)

What doesn´t kill you makes you stronger?

"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" - persistently was persuading me Kelly Clarkson, as I was trying to mutilate myself on a treadmill, finding pain in the parts of the body which were dormant for most of my life and feeling aching organs that I had no idea existed in my body before.

Source of photo (and an interesting blog about running)

Being half-conscious, to divert my mind from the pain purely out of survival precaution, I started thinking if is that really so - do we really need pain to grow? Does a person, who is blessed by a peaceful and quiet life, undisturbed by any sorts of turbulence, come up as an physical, emotional, spiritual cripple? And to follow the other extreme: going to the hell and back creates, basically, a superman? (oh, sorry, I meant a superwoman).

What happens if one doesn't get enough pain through life? Lets say, there's a moderately happily married life with 10 years on the back and two kids on the front. Then, one day there comes a realisation that the chest starts sliding down and actively forming a paunch, social networking becomes the most exciting thing, beer and caffeine have replaced water, in general - things have got out of control.

And there it starts - subconsciously,  persistently,  methodically we start to generate our own suffrage to get out of the couch and back on a horse: to be emotionally fit one gets an unobtainable love object - the wife of a neighbour will do, a colleague with its regularity of meetings is even better. After all the person doesn't matter - it is just is to train emotions, as Robbie Williams was confiding into my ears: "just want to feel real love, feel the home that I live in".  Next step is to ruin the family, get a divorce, see kids once a month, live alone and start looking for the meaning of life - all of these  to be spiritually fit and growing even further.

But what if we stay motionless in your moderately happily life? We stop being interesting to people - the absence of drama makes us lose colours and mimicry with the life itself. The most interesting people, writers, artists, politicians, actors, even "that nephew of the guy who lives next door", are the people with the wretched life and an ongoing crisis.

And we still think we are going for pleasure? That's our eternal shallow delusion, a trick formed by our refined inventive artful psyche, which wraps a bitter pill into the sweetness of a minute pleasure. "Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure" - floated the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald somewhere in my already half-conscious mind.

By following our unnecessary immediate wishes, overindulging in foods, sweets, tastes, with all sorts of social infidelities, we are methodically paving the way to our own abyss, so that later we would have a chance to apply all our strengths to get out of and become stronger, fitter, smarter. Or drown and die.

So, stating the obvious for everyone but me, I came to a conclusion, which helped me to finish those last minutes on the treadmill - that we need regular injections of pain, leading to suffrage, produced by our internal striving for crises. "Everything in moderation" - refrained Ancient Greeks in my head to beautiful Kelly, and I decided that was enough for the day.  

The song ended, treadmill stopped, I took out the earphones, and with a feeling of standing on the way to perfection, went home thinking about mundane things as what to cook for dinner for my moderately handsome husband who was babysitting our inquisitive beautiful baby-daughter, secretly thanking Providence for all that boring uneventful life that I was blessed with, hoping I was done with my pains at least till my next gym.


Copyright © 2013 by Olga Johannesson

Hi, I am Olga and I am a barbarian!

This Friday, the 8th of March, in the northern Russian city of Arkhangelsk, an atrocity of the prehistoric range happened in the open daylight as a pack of stray dogs tore apart to death a 7-year-old boy.
(for the Russians and other interested here's the link to the news).

    Source of photo
The boy was torn apart in minutes, as witnesses (obviously standing and watching, but who would easily dive into a hellball of swirling mad dogs, and a screaming little fellow, really, guys?) claim, the head was bitten out, the ambulance, which came later, had nothing more to do as to pick up together the blooded remains from the ground. The dogs disappeared. And, oh, Dear God Almighty, I have not made this story up.

Being a long-time dog-lover and having been following the news ever since it happened, I still cannot decide what I am shocked by the most: by the fact of an unbelievably monstrous, brute and nonsensical death of a child, by the horrors which actually happen on the streets of a more-or-less european city in the broad daylight, by the fact that it actually happened in the twenty-first century, by fact that the animals are still in the open, by the reaction of the witnesses, by the reaction of the authorities, by the reaction of the people, or by the mentality of my tribe in general.

For several days by now the discussion has been going on, and the dogs are still there, only two of them having been found and shot. As the mayor still sleeps peacefully undisturbed by the events, the society divides now into radicals and more radicals, who now raid the streets with air guns and deadly rat poisons, giving no chance to any animal, dog, cat, rat or armadillo, if they find any. Add up here slightly and not-so-slightly mentally disturbed people and possible dangers coming from them holding guns and rat poisons. Add up also numerous wounded dogs and dogs dying from the poison in the worst possible agony, hiding their corpses which no one attends. On the other side of the trench there are poor bullied animal protectors, who, within a night, have become the scapegoats.

A bit more educated people have dipped themselves into homey coziness of the vasts of the Internet and deliver aggressive or not-so-aggressive comments into the Universe, taking part in numerous polls and voting for "taking poor animals into the animal shelter".
Here, I would like to make a small diversion: of course there is a dog shelter in a 300 thousand city. The shelter with 180 dogs (currently) is going on despite everything due to the persistence and good-will of several volunteers. Minimally it costs 150 rubles (5 USD) per dog per day, and it is not financed by the city at all. On the other hand, there is no proper service for capturing stray animals as well. No one wants to take a stray home, very few want to seem brutal and unfair to the animals. So we have a full circle and an eaten boy.

And I am no better - in the homely Internet, typing out my shock of what has happened and the frustration of why it has happened. Why there are so many stray animals in my city and in every city in my country? Why we learned to brush teeth in the morning and use the toilet, but not to take the responsibility for an animal? Why is it possible that teenagers put a fireworks detonator into the dogs muzzle and blow it "just to see what happens"? Or burn a kitten, or throw the dog from the top floor onto the tarmac? What has gone wrong with people? Why no one is responsible for the death of a child?

It is deeply sad and hurtful to write all this about my people. Or we are just a tribe and under the cover of the night we all have become barbarians...



Copyright © 2013 by Olga Johannesson