Memento

(sursă foto: https://www.pinterest.it/pin/171629435789276691/)

Mama face parte din generația femeilor "fustă-pantaloni" care și-a exersat zilnic la serviciu autoritatea și competențele, iar acasă, în fața soțului, obediența. Îmi amintesc surpriza pe care am avut-o când am descoperit-o pe mama cea de fier, cât m-au uimit confidența ei, suplețea socială, forța, de fapt animalul politic. Mama muncea cât șapte, în plus făcea și desfăcea alianțe și intrigi cu o mare abilitate. Faza cu pile, cunoștințe, relații e ceva ce-am cunoscut în toată splendoarea. Nu era om la care să nu poată ajunge cu agenda ei, indiferent la câte sute de kilometri distanță. Dar acasă avea tradiționala listă de îndatoriri casnice pe care nu s-a gândit s-o conteste niciodată. Timpul ei de muncă era undeva la 16-18 ore pe zi. Și într-o parte, și într-alta, primea scutire foarte rar, numai în caz de boală gravă.  

Generația fustelor-pantaloni a fost una extrem de presurizată. Față de muncă și orânduirea politică, zel total. Față de soț, clasica poziție de subordonare. Față de părinți (inclusiv socri), respect și datoria de a le purta de grijă. Din toată familia, singurul căruia putea (chiar se cerea) să-i arate fermitate era copilul care la rândul său era responsabil să-și demonstreze buna creștere ca parte din respectabilitatea familiei.

Mama și-a adunat toate punctele ca un jucător de canastă, pentru că weltanschauungul ei a fost: respectarea rețetarului de îndatoriri = reușită = viață lungă și bună. Și-a amânat bucuriile și dorințele pentru pensie - înțeleasă ca timp al răsplatei.

I-ar fi fost mult mai ușor să creadă în rai. Pentru că dacă nu crezi în lumile bune de dincolo, trebuie să faci exercițiul zilnic al înțelegerii și acceptării morții. Trebuie să-ți faci gimnastica întrebărilor, să-ți flexezi mintea de la umor la seriozitate și înapoi, să fii un Sisif care se tot întoarce după bolovan. Întrebări ca să împingi limitele, umor ca să spargi tiparele, seriozitate ca să reconstruiești mai bine. 

Rânduiala în care a crezut ea a dispărut și a lăsat-o fără repere, plină de resentimente, neînțelegeri și temeri.

Bunica mea cea bolnavă a istovit-o.
Tata s-a topit pe neașteptate în trei luni.

Eu sunt urmașa care nu știe să poarte mai departe respectabilitatea familiei. 
Propria-i viață ordonată n-a scutit-o de un cancer foarte încăpățânat.

Am ajuns față în față cu o mamă bolnavă care se lasă terorizată de necunoscutele zilei de mâine, care tot regretă și tot încearcă să rescrie trecutul. Care se plânge de singurătate cu mine alături. Care vânează toate știrile și veștile proaste ca să se hrănească cu toxinele lor și să mi le regurgiteze și mie. Care mă încearcă permanent cu șantaje emoționale. Care nu mai primește deplin nicio bucurie. Pentru ea viața e întotdeauna în altă parte, vorba lui Kundera, iar ce fac eu nu-i niciodată suficient.

- Mamă, ai ziua de azi, ai momentul ăsta, îi spun.

Mama se uită prin mine și-mi spune că mie mi-e ușor să vorbesc. Eu încă le am pe toate. Ea nu mai are nimic. 

Ce e extraordinar s-a întâmplat deja, e viața. Ce miracol mai mare să-ți poți imagina sau aștepta.

Mi-e tare teamă că se duce fără să mai simtă minunea aia numită secundă de fericire. Care ne e tuturor atât de aproape și n-are legătură cu nici un inventar. 
Memento mori trebuie să redevină parte din educația noastră. Moartea trebuie salvată de stigma eșecului, a pedepsei sau a cumplitului, ca să ne țină atenția trează spre fracțiunilea acelea de secundă care sunt desăvârșite.

There's no such thing as Human Rights

 

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) starts with a great dream, the sum-up of the following 29 articles:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.(https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights)

We've never accomplished it. Every single day we break every single paragraph:

No discrimination, slavery, torture and inhuman treatment, unfair detainment;

Equal before law;

Right to life, marry and have family, privacy, asylum, nationality, own things, assemble, democracy, fair trial, social security, social service, work, rest and holiday, education, culture and art;

Freedom of thought and religion, of opinion and expression, to movement and residence.

My wishlist would go even further:

Right to voluntary euthanasia. Suffering and agony can be utterly humiliating and painful. I'd be so relieved to know I have the option to exit with MY choice of dignity.

Right to redefine oneself (name, gender etc.) at age of maturity. It's understandable if you're not happy being named X Æ A-12 or Snowdrop or whatever else your crazy parents chose for you. Parent's decision should not follow their adult children.

I wish all forms of civil partnership could be valid, no matter the gender and the number of adults involved.

Right to one's body (abortion, sex change, organs donation, type of funerals etc).

Right to a healthy and sustainable environment. And I could go on and on, but it's useless.

Afghanistan just happened. UDHR, all of it, has been cancelled again. For national issues we can address our government if we're lucky to live in the democratic part of the world. But when it's not about our own country and we need to yell our guts out because of the Human Rights violations that we're being concerned about, where do we go?

Human Rights violation does not have any consequence. What we have is merely a checklist of our worst failures as humanity.

Right to peace. Oh, you thought we have it at least acknowledged. No, we don't. The Human Rights Council is a joke. So is the Security Council. Some of the worst dictatorships can decide on peace, human rights and democracy.

Israeli occupation and ethnic cleansing, Kashmir dispute, Khmer Rouge regime, Somali civil war, Rwandan civil war, Syrian civil war, Yemen civil war, Srebrenica massacre, Rohingya massacre, Sudan conflicts etc. 

What do you say, UN? Peace, dignity and equality on a healthy planet?

Go fuck yourself.

Red Light Maze

 

Sleeping Hermaphroditus, ancient marble sculpture at Louvre Museum

It's more uncomfortable to talk about sexuality than about wars, diseases or even death, it's a subject so broad and controversial. Way more often I've heard people talking about their sexual acts, than about their sexuality (feelings, thoughts, attractions, behaviours). 

Sexuality goes to strange places that few people feel fine to share about.

Rage, fear and reproductive drive come all from the same command center, the reptilian brain. But we're not lizards anymore, we got much fancier and complicated, we experience and express our sexuality not only biologically, but also erotically, emotionally, socially and spiritually. As if it wasn't already crazy enough, we flamed this cocktail with morality and religion for hundreds of years, trying to distillate it into a plain drink, vanilla sex. It's true that a vast majority of individuals are sexually predisposed exclusively to the other sex, but the modern heterosexual behaviour has been experiencing way behind vaginal intercourse, marital relationship, monogamy, or conventional sex. The numbers about the LGBTQIA+ community are as random as they can be, depending on quite a lot of conditions like country, religion, social environment, culture, education, age groups, type of questionnaire, etc. Hence we only know it's a minority who dares more or less (or at all) to go public with its stories. The first gay pride was only 50 years ago. The sexual revolution started in the US in the '60, but it still didn't arrive in all countries.

The newcomers to the democracy have already been facing a great challenge to understand and contain the deviations from their long-established norms. The pandemic came on the top of it with the power talk. Since it started, we're witnessing flare-ups around the human rights - they're getting undermined by dominant parties or rulers in some countries, or upgraded in others where the activism is strong and the public opinion, progressive. Of course sexuality couldn't miss this party. Gay rights gained ground in many countries, legalizing same-sex marriage or decriminalizing the homosexuality, but suffered a setback (together with women rights) in few others like Poland, Hungary, Russia, losing gender recognition, banning the same-sex marriage, forbidding abortions, reiterating violence against women.
The Pope Francis set up a confusing paradigm, on one hand, he said, Homosexual people have a right to be in a family. They are children of God and have a right to a family. Nobody should be thrown out or be made miserable over it. Afterwards he came with a clarification, he was referring to the right to be accepted by their own families as children and siblings, but not that they had a right to have a family.
In other words, be gays, but not happily wedded.

In 2020 we heard about gender like never before. Ellen Page came out as a transgender, changing his name into Elliot Page. Eddie Izzard came out as a gender fluid, with the gender identity she. I applaud them both for being so gutsy and honest. Coming out only to family and friends is already a long and painful trip, I know it from my own experience. Anyway, nowadays the gayness is almost boring next to the other sex and gender categories in the spotlight (intersex, non-binary, pangender, two-spirit, spectrasexual, demisexual, etc.). It's great we talk about all of it, it's great we strengthen the rights to protect everyone. But it gets problematic when it comes to changing lifetime habits to accommodate a great diversity that represents a small minority.  A hospital in UK (BSUH) went public into supporting the transgender parents using gender-neutral language: chestfeeding, human milk, co-parent, second biological parent etc. A list dedicated to gender identity and expression put together 64 terms: https://www.healthline.com/health/different-genders#why-it-matters

Vocabularies have inflated to represent the whole sexual & gender spectrum. It gets intimidating. It's a lot to digest at once.

The right to define one's self should definitely be on the list of the human rights. So we can get over it. It's always like this, once we get a right, we recall it less and less. Now it's about words, words, words. When we start chocking with them, maybe we'll create a new way to simplify our dialogue, one that keeps everyone safe and respected. I found out about the sexual vocabulary much later than my erotical experiences. I didn't need any terms, the body language always did the trick better than any explanation. Only our minds are made of words, if we obsess on them, we'll miss everything else.

I'm going with what Luis Buñuel said: If I had to define myself? I’d walk out the door without a word. I don’t define myself.

Smoke and mirrors

There's been so much going on lately, beside the pandemic! We've got to the point where we're fighting shadows - symbols, ideas, words, as if they are responsible for the social and moral mess. Race became perhaps the hottest topic, but the actions are rather flashy and random. We're missing a solid long-term strategy.

The lockdowns put us in a low-adrenaline condition while we're addicted to the opposite. One of the emotions that increases the level of adrenaline is the anger. There are many types identified, one of them being the justifiable anger. It's defined as a sense of moral outrage to the injustices like the destruction of the environment, oppression of human rights, cruelty towards animals etc. Suddently so many issues that have been ignored for so long became urgent to be fixed. Of course I'm all for it, but it makes me wonder why now?

Is it because we have more time to think about them? Are we really ready to accomodate all the deep changes we're asking for, or we only use these righteous reasons to get our adrenaline up again, to feel that we're important/alive/useful, ultimately feel better about our own selves?

Racism is probably the scariest skeleton in our closet.

Black Lives Matter is a social movement dedicated to fighting racism and police brutality against Black people, but lately the focus shifted to fighting White Supremacy. They're not the same to me. BLM focuses on the rights, the other one on the blame; BLM engages me, makes me solidar with the cause, the other one gives me chills, as I see a potential of reverse discrimination.

Supremacy is about privileged groups and these can be based on social class, physical characteristics, ethnic category, gender or religion - so why not fighting all kinds of discrimination? Any empowered majority tend to discriminate the minorities around - isn't the general malpractice we should fight against, instead of selecting the mistreatments?

At Joe Biden and Kamala Harris inauguration, the young Black poet Amanda Gorman read a poem she wrote after witnessing the siege on the Capitol, "The Hill We Climb", here's an excerpt:

We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one.

And yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine,
but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.
We are striving to forge a union with purpose,
to compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and
conditions of man.
And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us,
but what stands before us.
We close the divide because we know, to put our future first,
we must first put our differences aside.
We lay down our arms
so we can reach out our arms
to one another.
We seek harm to none and harmony for all.

This beautiful moment is now being followed by embarrassment, as various voices started the conversation about Who should get to translate her work in different languages. But the question is not about the professional background, it's about the personal one (color, gender etc). It's where resentments start.

Cultural boycott goes fast and furious to all levels, from popular to academic. In Brussels, the manifestations against racism clotted around the figure of Leopold II who implemented a forced-labour system in the Congo. Following people's choice, the government changed the name of a tunnel from Leopold II to Annie Cordy, a Belgium singer. Yet some voices raised up to contest Annie Cordy because of one of her songs, Chaud cacao, now reconsidered to be racist.

I don't care much about rulers, but what a horrible misunderstanding when it comes to discuss about cancelling Shakespeare in schools because of misogyny, racism, anti-semitism or homophobia examples in his plays. Even if we let aside the arguments about the value of Shakespeare's work, about his intentions and the very little we know about his life, even then, how can we hold Shakespeare responsible for concepts that belongs to the late 20th century, like political correctness? 

Misogyny, racism, anti-semitism and homophobia have been the norm all across the world, for such a long time, of course we will find their traces everywhere. What we will be left with, if we take all the texts, films, songs, etc., out of their context and cancel everything we don't find politically correct? Because if we want to do that, we should start with the Bible, the oldest catalogue for almost every type of discrimination - will you dare it, woke friends?

Isn't cancel culture just another form of oppressing the intelligence?

Quotas are very popular these days as compensation for having lacked rights for so many centuries. But is anyone benefiting from it? The numbers look better for the Blacks this year, now we have to hire more Hispanics - sounds awful, dehumanising and devaluing everyone. Unfortunately it's a true recent story from a company in California.

Quotas and cancellations only hide the real problems and deepen the conflicts.

So, shouldn't we change the way we perceive people? 

Most of us are used to only looking, to register an image and associate it or even replace it with patterns (prejudices, stereotypes, etc). It gets much better when we start exchanging stories, listening to each other. And pretty great when we understand and share the feelings, connecting.

Humanity at a Crossroads: Enlightenment or Ignorance

(drawing by Dan Perjovschi)

We live in times of turmoil and democratic backsliding all around the world. It's started some years before the pandemic, with so many crises that have been ignored: the growing income inequality, environmental problems, overconsumption, pollution, illiteracy, wars.

This is how our world looks today, few facts and numbers:

Wealth distribution: bottom 70% of the world population has under 3% of the world wealth share (< 10.000 $), the next 21% has 11% (10.000 – 100.000 $), next 8% has another 40% (100.000 - 1.000.000 $) and less than 1% of the world population has 46% of the world wealth share (> 1.000.000 $).
These numbers make the charity/donations programs look like a sham.

Wastage: We generate at least 3.5 million tons of plastic and other solid waste A DAY and only a very small percentage is recycled (around 9% of the total that's ever been produced). Most of it—79%—is in a landfill or escaped into the natural environment, and only 12% has been incinerated. Basically we eat it, drink it, breathe it.
We are almost 8 billion people on this planet, of which almost 1 billion are starving. Yet we annually lose and waste 1,3 billion tons of food – or enough to feed 3 billion people. Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year gets lost or wasted.

Illiteracy: According to UNESCO, there are more than 770 million people around the world (two-thirds of adult women) who cannot read or write.

 
Fire arms: There are more than 1 billion fire arms in the world, around 85% being in the civilian hands.

Democracy: According to the Democracy Index in 2019, only 22 countries are full democracies. More than 1/3 of the world population lives under authoritarian regimes in 54 countries.

(drawing by Dan Perjovschi)

So we've been having global issues that we cannot address with global solutions because of the damn national/local politics. There's been anger and frustration going around even before Covid, now they just started to be expressed louder and louder.
Five years ago Trump won the elections with the promise to make America great again. Brexit promised no more immigrants and living standards much improved. Nationalist parties in Europe have been on the rise since a few good years.
What do all these populists actually bring up? The past. They promise to bring back "the great past". So, back to mine coals, hardcore capitalism, island mentality, religion, obsolete morality obsessing over sexuality (same-sex marriage, abortions), but no commitment to solve the root causes - all the forms of abuses and crimes - because these can't really be solved easily, can they? 

We can't think only as nations anymore, we have to start thinking as one great humanity.
As citizens of a global society we need to make a decisive choice between make-believe (the great national or religious past that should be brought back, as this would even be possible!) and the undertaking of a totally new paradigm with political reforms at every level.

But what chances do we have to succeed when this pandemic is putting so much more pressure on people, and the societies are getting even more polarized? In these times we've tended to stick with minds alike and that has fractured the communities into small homogenous tribes, with the risks of losing some to various forms of radicalism.
Under these circumstances what do you think it gets done easier: 

- empowering an authority who promise to fulfil dreams 

OR 

- accepting that we are all part of the failures, so we must all take responsibility and contribute (by paying our taxes, respectig the laws as they are, going to vote to improve them, controlling our wastages, respecting our human diversity and environment)? 

(drawing by Dan Perjovschi)

Today we have half of the world population living in democracies (full or flawed) and the other half in hybrid regimes or dictatorships.
But how long even these democracies will resist with decisions based on majority criteria, when the majority gets poorer and/or insufficiently educated?

More and more elections and major political decisions pass with a weak majority, leaving the societies deeply divided (traditionalism vs. liberalism) - that is, at risk.

A new age is coming. Of which kind?