Adolescenta Romaniei

Nu m-a interest niciodata cu adevarat politica, dupa cum nu ma intereseaza filmele de actiune la care, pentru motive pe care probabil nu le voi intelege niciodata cu adevarat, ma apuca somnul si adorm. Ca sa ma justific, explic familiei care nu intarzie niciodata sa ma ia peste picior: “Nu e varsta, ba desteptilor. Eu sunt doar un instrument foarte precis de masura: cu cat filmul de actiune e mai prost, cu atat adorm mai repede.” Si de obicei filmele de actiune proaste sunt alea care ingramadesc la inceput servieta diplomat cu bomba atomica impaturita ca o camasa inauntru, ticaind inebunitor in timp ce de’alde Ghita Sapteluntre (varianta americana), ia cladirea la subrat si fuge cu ea in afara orasului, ca sa o goleasca de teroristi. Dar mai bine sa ne concentram acum atentia pe ideea de politica ca film de actiune.

Ceea ce se intampla in Romania zilele astea, cu de-alde referendumul presidential si toate discutiile pro so contra care par sa paralizeze tara intr-o analiza atrofianta, nu ma adoarme, ci ma face sa urmaresc cu interes si sa gandesc. Semn ca filmul regizat de politicienii zilei e de calitate buna.Despre ce e filmul asta? Nu este despre oameni (Traian, Antonescu, Victor, Crin, Basescu, Ponta, etc.) Este un film despre “revelatie.” Exista un termen foarte bun in engleza, “awakening” care este potrivit pentru situatia discutata. Spre deosebire de varul lui semantic “epiphany” care este foarte religios in conotatie, si se manifesta de obicei ca o izbitura mentala (bang, adevarul mi s-a relevat brusc!), “awakening” implica evolutie temporala, foarte asemanatoare trezirii din somn care ia, in functie de individ, de la cateva zeci de secunde la o jumatate de zi (fiu’ meu al mare, de exemplu.) Pe langa faptul ca este o revelatie, “cazul referendumului presidential” este si o “invatare de minte.” Din punctual meu de vedere, “invatarea de minte” are doua aspecte:

1. Practica sau “training” in cursul careia mintea, individuala sau colectiva, acapareaza noi cunostiinte prin expunere la explicare, impartasire (“sharing”) sau traire directa.
2. Abilitatea de a nu mai face greseli maine, bazata pe cunostiintele dobandite azi.

“Basesciada romaneasca” are toate elementele care sa o califice drept un excelent candidat pentru revelatie si invatare de minte, ambele venind in doua pachete la fel de valoroase: individual si colectiv. Este una dintre sansele bune ale Romaniei ca sa creasca ca natie (in sensul de "maturizare" sau "coacere") si sa se mai apropie cu un pas de iesirea din stadiul de adolescenta (“teenaging years”) in care au tinut-o evenimente istorice in afara controlului ei, pe care le-au orchestrat bulangii (termen provenit din “bullying” care este un substantiv foarte puternic si foarte folosit in limba engleza) istorici ai momentului: Rusia, Anglia, America, Germania…

Basesciada ma duce cu gandul la comportamentele de adolescent ale fiilor mei. In ciuda explicatiilor constante despre bine si rau pe care le-am oferit, free of charge and with all good intentions, fiind primite in aproape toate cazurile ca total ne-avenite si ne-binevenite (“Leave me alone! Get out of my room!”), in final sunt ei insisi care trebuie sa treaca prin “crappy, revelatory moments” ca sa realizeze ce e bine si ce e rau. Trebuie sa fie ei care sa vina cu solutia pe care tu o stiai cu mult inainte de a incepe o alta discutia lunga, combativa si istovitoare. Orice incercare de a-i impinge prea repede in afara granitelor varstei este sortita esecului.

Romania noastra e inca adolescent politic. Au tinut-o in situatia asta cei cincizeci de ani de oprire fortzata a cresterii, controlata draconic de parinti iresponsabili. Iar acum, “brusc si dintr-o data” (pleonasmul imi apartine si il folosesc pentru ca suna “cool”) ne-am trezit aruncati in lumea celor maturi, cerandu-ni-ne sa ne comportam si sa facem decizii de oameni maturi. Si bineinteles ca nu putem: nici individual, nici colectiv (ca societate). E prea devreme. Nu suntem inca acolo (Brucane, Brucane!), dar invatam. Nimeni nu ramane forever in stadiul de adolescent, fie el istoric sau politic. La un moment dat, clasa politica romaneasca va incepe sa se comporte matur, iar populatia Romaniei, care va fi mult mai putin interesata sa ii urmareasca pas cu pas prin dormitoarele lor private si mai mult doritoare sa vada rezultatele practice al guvernarii, va deveni si ea matura.

Cat despre greseli, le fac si natii mature, pentru ca sunt oamenii care fac natiile, si nu invers. Iar oamenii au tendinta sa reactioneze la fel la stimulii externi si interni, si sa faca aceleasi greseli. Cu cativa ani in urma, ministrul de finante din guvernul federal al Canadei a pus la cale o lovitura de palat ca sa il debarce pe primul ministru de atunci, de altfel o foarte respectabila si longeviva figura politica. Puciul a reusit numai pe jumatate: ministrul de finante si acolitii lui au fost dati in vileag, dar dupa vreo jumatate de an prim-ministrul a demisionat: ii venise timpul. Iar pucistii au avut sansa sa isi concentreze atentia pe business-urile lor personale, care fusesera neglijate cat timp facusera politica.

Acum vreo trei-patru ani, o troica formata din cei trei lideri ai opozitiei a vrut sa il debarce pe prim-ministrul de atunci (totodata prim-ministrul de acum) mai mult pe motivul ca era o fire discretionara si aroganta. Puciul nu a reusit, pentru ca prim-ministrul a actionat abil si inteligent (a folosit briliant prevederile constitutiei), si a evitat criza. In ambele situatii, presa a tratat cu seriozitate evenimentele, punand articole pe prima pagina, dar fara prea mult interes, si nici o urma de pasiune. Din portia zilnica de 9 minute de stiri la ora 9 pe Radio CBC (longest morning radio news segment in the country), 2 minute in medie au fost dedicate evenimentelor. Oamenii nu au reactionat nici atat, din doua motive:

1. oamenii aici sunt prea preocupati de ce trebuie sa faca cu si pentru vietile lor, in loc sa astepte sa faca altii (thank you, Mister JFK)
2. oamenii aici au incredere in liderii lor si stiu ca vor gasi solutia potrivita la orice situatie care se se califica drept criza (uneori increderea asta trece in indiferenta, cu toate urmarile posibil nefaste, dar asta e alta mancare de peste!)

E clar ca maturizarea ia ceva timp. Daca e sa comparam cu varsta omului, un sfert de perioada (20 din 80 de ani) e petrecuta in adolescenta. Probabil una dintre cele mai lungi pregatiri de zbor din spectrul animal. Adolescenta, ca sa fie eficace si sa devina piatra de temelie a maturitatii, necesita experimentare constanta si cantitati importante de esec. Numai ca experientele si esecurile nu trebuie sa lase urme adanci, sa altereze personalitatea, sau sa zguduie incredera adolescentului in puterea lui decizionara. Si exact asta e situatia actuala: nimic cu adevarat rau nu se poate intampla ca urmare a basesciadei: nu exista nici un risc de dictatura militara (care armata?) sau restauratie politica (care dictatori politici cu Bruxelles-ul la numai 600 km distanta si Berlinul, da, Belinul, si mai aproape?) Iar de Moscova nu va temeti: un dulau mare cu glasul pierit, ragusit si serios dogit de atata latrat in trecut, in prezent cu magazia de ideologii goala…

Lucrul bun este ca odata ce circul va parasi orasul (“the circus is out of town”) toti vom fi invatat dintr-o lectie care ne duce cu un pas mai aproape de maturitate. Dar nu va bucurati prea devreme. Maturitatea vine cu umbra ei: nu mai e "fun".

The Story of Oneself

A guy I really like not only for his outstanding professional skills, brilliance in exposure or posh dressing, but mainly because he seems to be the only cool guy I happen to know carrying with him the magic touch of the sixties, is Gary B. Gary has psychology training and he is using his vast knowledge and experience to fix fractured marriages and to mend workplace misfits. From him I learned that our core self has three development stages:

1. Biological Self: The Rough First Draft - The lifelong, prewired genetic, biological, predispositional biases and traits that we naturally and unconsciously use to experience, filter, interpret and guide our life.
2. Psychological Self: The Edited Version - The pattern of psychologically adaptations that emerges based on our biological preferences and biases in response to the specific environments and challenges we happen to face in the course of our early, adolescent and adult life
3. Biographical Self: The Final Version - The story or narrative we develop and use from the first two stages to make sense of our lives. They are not necessarily true stories, but simplified and selective reconstructions of the past, often forged by or connected to an idealized version of the future.

If you have gone over the previous three paragraphs by reading every word, I have to give it to you: you deserve big kudos, if only for the reason that if you didn’t do it you’ll have to come back later anyway, by the end of this post, to understand what the heck did I mean by that. And if you didn’t do it and you just changed the web page in disgust for another smart ass who poses as a pub philosopher, that’s okay too, because this post is in no way meant to annoy people who feel at ease in their bubble of comfort and complacency (this being a highly recommended combination for a stress-free life recipe.) And thank God that I wasn’t a popular figure in 12B, not then, not now, to risk to disappoint you in the same way a person of interest would disappoint you if it were to be proved from reliable sources that between being a politician, making money or writing, he actually loves and would pick - if a fairy gave him the option to choose - the writing!

Anyway, let’s hop back on the saddle of the rhetoric we ride on… Which are my points exactly?

My first point (exactly) is that we all are now at an age when we dislike the environment (what am I saying, we reject it!) when the environment doesn’t fit to our story's prewired expectations (you may notice that I am using the term story as defined in the third paragraph above.) In other words, if the people are not the way we expect them to be, or they don’t behave as we’d like them to behave, or even display physical traits that do not entice us, then just forget it, we do not need them! If our children are not as smart or as successful as we expected, they'd better get their story right because this could become a deal breaker (imagine the embarrassment you'd feel when sharing their failures with our dear friends whose children are rowing next year for Oxford!) If the political parties do not perform as we expect, or align to our moral values, or to any moral values for that matter, to hell with them! Better go with a cunning, and equally smartass dictator! If the native country's landscapes reflect nowadays the sun light differently than in our teenage years, when Fagaras Mountains were the best product of God’s imagination, then better live without them: who needs those mountains and who needs God when we have Oasis channel and Ricky Gervais Show, both in HDTV? The list can continue…

What I am trying to say is to be explained by my second point (exactly), which follows…

When we were young, inexperienced and even retarded (this is actually a good term, as it’s coming from French and it means moving slower, therefore being capable of absorbing more, or - my preference- coming late of age, which is not counter-productive, it’s even advantageous since I myself was retarded, I still am, and I'm very well, thank you!), we wanted to fit in the surrounding medium, to indulge in the environment's favours and please its players, to become the successful users of a world that has been given to us, put at our disposal entirely for enjoyment, nourishment and usage. We wanted to get good marks (and in the process to please both the teachers and the parents), to get good looking girls out for a date (Oh, Joanna, how much I wanted to make you like me!), to look cool in a new pair of jeans (and how much I longed for that, since I was a poor no-one in a class of a-ones with opportunities – notice that I don’t use the term rich as that notion didn’t exist at the time I am talking about here!) And the list continues...

Some of us have trudged straight through the muddled waters of those slow and boring growing stages, some others took either efficient shortcuts or scenic detours, have been exemplary students (where are those math Olympics and their theorems heroes?) or maybe just horrible teenagers, i.e. pain in the ass youngsters, which means that actually they were freedom fighters against the (parental) staleness and misconceptions that stopped them from being social-environmentally adapted and acclimatised (the long hair and the bootleg pants being the rule!) The idiotic leaders, the absurd dictatorship, the food shortage where the bread and butter were a luxury, the favouritisms, the racism and xenophobia as pillars of the Romanian way of life, who gave a crap on that? Who had time for that? Who thought that that was important? Who had the age for that? We studied communist revisited history  in communist schools , we read communist compliant literature, we watched television communist shows with actors who have formed themselves in communist acting schools, we listened to interviews given by communist scientists who based their researches on communist funds. Of course we didn't give a rat’s ass on those things. Who cared about those? All we wanted was to become successful in that kind of environment, in that kind of society. We strived through everything we did to become part of IT, the environment, to have a seat at the regime's powerfuls' dinner table. And now I'm not talking about the genuine 12B, of course: I'm talking about 12B-ers in their late twenties, early thirties...

But then we got older and we started to build up our stories, or the biographical selves, how Gary nicely (and sagely) puts it. Our stories are already final. I saw it in the videos of your gatherings in Craiova, in your discussions recorded live during the dinner, I read it in every email you send… Everyone has a story of herself or himself, and is eager to share it (like publishing or "in your face"-ing) on every communication channel. This is the final version that is going to shortly outlive us in the memories of our children, who will probably say things like “man, my father was a smart guy, he did good in life, but sometimes he was such an ass, I’m telling you!”, or in some friends' short-lived recollections ("that guy was smart for himself, the son of a bitch, but such a pompous ass, never sharing the pie with anybody!") or in brief obituaries on the last page of an (online) newspaper with the lowest number of hits ("loving father and outstanding citizen who leaves behind a long lasting legacy.").

This final version is who we are now, after a long journey throughout which, after making scores of mistakes, misjudgments, and missing tons of love (given or taken) and tons of opportunities, while living the sweet moments of life and outliving its sour mishaps, we came to what we are now. Who we are and what we are. And nothing is going to change us now, no new environment, no new society, no new world. Not even a revolution of the common sense, that’s happening from time to time in the mankind history but lives too short to be mentioned in any serious historical tome.

Now we are a group of fifty plus-ers, the former students of a Class 12B, of a provincial high-school, of some alumni, of some year, 1979. And after sharing chunks of our initial stories that were either part of the biological self (faking the vocal ability only to get to the second voice in our prodigious choir), or psychological self (Oh, Joana!), hence making our successful blog work, we finally got to the biographical self. That conversion happened when we started to talk about ourselves and the accomplishments we are rightfully proud of (business, money, emigration, politics, family, travel.)  That’s when we started to sell our own stories, with the understated clause that the sale is final, no adjustments can be made after processing the transaction, and the returns are out of question. And if you cared to notice, all these stories are like riverstones embedded in a thick, indestructible wall of cemented indifference, with no hammer able to displace or even seriously dent them. Basically what everybody says is: Listen to me, this is how it is! Based on their own story. Nobody tries to be flexible or make an amendment, because any adjustment would mean a denouncement of their own story, and nobody would even accept the idea of being wrong in front of their fellow story-tellers. His truth is above anybody else's truth, indestructible, invincible.

I? I did the same… I cannot accept the idea that others may be right, and I may be wrong. Or that sometimes I am lopsided, or plain biased, in my judgement. God knows I have been doing this for a while. Only recently, after coming from a mentally exhausting trip to Romania, during which what I had found was different different of what I expected (of what my own story mentions under  the column "to be expected from this journey in places you know"), I ended up by rejecting everything. Nothing was good, all was bad, down the drain with it. Me? No to challenges. No to corrections. I am done with my story. Without it, or even with it slightly changed, I'd be nothing.I'd be back to square one, discovering things...

We are too old to be at another stage than stage 3 above, ladies and gentlemen! After all, this is the natural course of life. After a certain age, the only way we have left to communicate with each other is by enforcing our story in every conversation we initiate. With the foreseeable side effect of paying a price: that of becoming confrontational (and who cares about that, since it’s about defending our story?) So, what happened in our good-turned-bad email debate is just normal: it’s part of life. And guess what? From this perspective, every single one of us is right, because every single one of us has a story he or she worked hard to make it sound true, and bring it to its final version. No changes in the environment (less of an angel come down to Earth to reveal that only the no-story-owners will make it to the after-life) will make us change our lines.

But there's an appendix to the story: the one that requires us to take care of our youngsters who are still at their first two stages (biological and psychological.) They do not have their stories finished yet. They strive to take a dive in the strong currents of the environments we have been building for them. To lose themselves in both warm and cold currents. Let them do that. Let them grow and get by themselves to the point where they can write the closing paragraphs in their final versions of their stories. After that be free to start selling their stories to each other. And in the process become confrontational. Because without a story there's no confrontation, and without confrontation there's no life.