One of my biggest reasons for not voting for our current president (other than the fact he's a blubbering twat) was the utterly piss-poor job he'd done in his previous function as the Mayor of Bucharest. I kept talking to people, insisting he was our only choice, and I always found myself asking,
How? We've been complaining together over all the shitty ways in which this city is mismanaged for years, and now, you want to vote for the guy in charge to run even more of the show?!
Made little sense to me. So I didn't vote for him. I voted for the other guy. The nationalist who was gonna take us out of the European Union (as if) and jet-set us back to them good old Commie days. So naturally, when things started going tits up*, I didn't much work to suppress a smirk. I thought, like many of us did, that's what you get, fuckers.
The other day, I stopped in the street to chat with one of my mum's neighbors, and we got to sharing this kind of sentiment. At two weeks without gas for several buildings in my city, tempers are flying a bit high, and understandably so. Personally, I'm only moderately inconvenienced, as I still have a working oven, but many people depend on gas for indoor heating, hot water, and all their cooking, and are either caring for small children, elderly parents (like this neighbor), or perhaps elderly or in some way struggling themselves.
What a fucking joke. Meanwhile, everyone's having to pay absurd amounts for mysterious "repairs", gas detectors, and other such. All to the company that was primarily responsible for the death of three innocent people in that terrible explosion a couple weeks back.
Fuck me.
Naturally, we got to agreeing it's all the fault of "them", the gullible numptys who voted for our little Sorbonne star in the Presidential Palace. There's a certain satisfaction to saying "I hope you're happy now".
Except it's not their fault, not really.
Obviously, as a fairly intelligent person, I realize "our guy" might've been as bad if not worse (you must always remember there's the possibility, no matter how bad things are, of worse). After all, that was the current Prez's main marketing ploy - vote for me because the other guy will be worse. A pro-Trump nationalist who was apparently critical of the EU's golden-heart intentions?
Mother Russia, here we come.
What bugs me with this narrative (very popular across the former Eastern Bloc) is that it's using the terrible ghost of the big bad Boogeyman of the past and utterly overlooking current monsters under the bed. When we run up against a bad person, we hopefully learn (through much suffering and toil) not to mess with that kind of person again. Your brain gets a new ridge saying,
Watch out. That's a nasty fucker, that, and you should absolutely stay away from people like that.
However. If I keep my narrow focus solely on that bad guy, I risk ignoring other evil. I've ran up against some bad fuckers in my life, and I've noticed sometimes a tendency to say, when faced with new people, "oh but they're not nearly as bad as that guy". No. But that didn't mean they were good, either. You can fuck up a lot of your life thinking you're doing good because you're not falling down that previously-identified landmine-ridden trap. Make no mistake, though, it's still a bad road.
Of course, with politics, we've unfortunately resigned ourselves to the notion that we must side with the lesser evil (the thought that there shouldn't be any evil, at least not directed at one's own populace, sadly seems passe).
So one problem is the narrative. Yes, personally, I see just as much threat in many political "good guys" as in the known aggressors. Just look at all this (allegedly) antifa woke mob that's been dominating Western discourse for years. We think we're escaping, but the Devil's known for changing costume a lot, so beware.
Another issue, one I've often written about, is this illusion of the right choice. Now, me and the neighbor get to feel entitled and righteous because we didn't vote for this clown. We would've made the right choice, and did. Had it gone our way, things would not be as bad. Naturally, if things had gone the other way around, "they" would be saying the same thing right about now.
We're haunted both in our personal and our public lives by this specter of the right choice. When people started talking about binary, it seems we abolished the wrong one. It's this outdated (but very powerful belief) that there is a definite right and wrong, a black and white, to govern our lives by, that's causing so much grief and division.
The fact that "our guy" didn't get in, while "theirs" did is pure happenstance. What should worry us more is we've somehow let them convince us they are our guys at all, when they're not. It carries about as much weight as me rooting for Luka Modric every big championship as "my guy". Which is all fine and dandy, quite innocent all in all, unless I start going across the bar to the guy rooting for the opposite team and busting a bottle over his head.
Which is largely what we're devolving to. While not nearly as worrying as in the US, political division has become a terrifying and troublesome societal corrosive in our beloved Europe, one we should be most wary of. We must seek to bypass the illusion of having made the "right choice", especially if it comes at the expense (physical or purely social) of the person next to us making the "wrong" choice.
It's one helluva humbling act. Understanding that none of us knows, that we are all every day making less-than-shiny choices, that we may be wittingly or unwittingly contributing to terrible outcomes while still being good people... and figuring out how to move past it.
After all, it's only once we start thinking and working together that we realize "us vs them" didn't pit neighbor against neighbor, but a society of striving people against malicious saboteurs who'd let you and your children starve.
Are you out there?
In the same nightmare?
I wanna wake up in
That Europe I fell asleep in.
*even more. Tits up even more. Arguably, there's few ways in which it can go more tits up than having a democratic election annulled in a democracy.