There’s an accurate saying: “The well-fed cannot understand the hungry”. In our country, thank God, there are only several people who have lost count of their money. But the majority of the population lives “hand to mouth”, i.e. from paycheck to paycheck. There are many people who have no sort of savings whatsoever – they live, purchasing products only on the money that they receive on a certain day from the ATM. Scraping the last bits of money from their wallets for bread or milk, they take comfort in the fact that “tomorrow I’ll receive my wages, pension, allowance, etc.” But great is their disappointment when the transfer of funds to their accounts is delayed, or when the funds are transferred, but there turns out not to be money in the ATM itself.
On November 7, exactly on the day of the forgotten holiday of the Great October Socialist Revolution, institutions transferred citizens their pensions. This means that a citizen inserts his card in the ATM, enters his code, and the display window ‘cheerfully’ announces that he can receive the sum credited to him. He enters the amount he needs, and the ATM announces that he must “choose another operation”. The citizen doesn’t yet understand, pushes the buttons and once more tries to receive his money, but the ATM once again advises him to “choose another operation”. Finally, when he obtusely repeats his attempt a third time, one of the young passers-by explains to him: “there’s no money in the ATM”.
This citizen hurries to another ATM. There, the same story is repeated. A third ATM is also empty. A fourth, fifth, and so on…
At last, the citizen realizes that the sum credited to him has been transferred virtually, but it doesn’t exist in reality. Those gentlemen who should have loaded up the ATMs with cash didn’t fulfill their work, the money wasn’t inserted. Why didn’t they do so? Are they negligent workers? Or is there no cash to be had? Maybe both?
Our citizen begins to think negative thoughts and express himself in a negative way. Directed towards whom? Of course, towards the government. And, truth be told, he’s right. The government is responsible for any negligence of its functionaries. It is the government that picked them out, didn’t train them, set them loose, didn’t keep tabs on them, allowed them to go overlooked and without shame. So it is the government, the mother that birthed them, that is guilty of the fact that our citizen had to go on without the miserly sums credited to him. Though bear in mind that it was she, the government, who gave him these mere pennies…
There was a film in the sixties. It was called
Seryozha
. A black-and-white film, on morality and a person’s power to choose their fate. There was one sequence in the film that became very popular. A mother, unmarried but trying to find a life partner, introduces an unsavory guy, her boyfriend, to her young son Seryozha. The boyfriend offers Seryozha a candy. Seryozha, shy and with a good upbringing, takes the candy, unwraps it, and sees that instead of candy, there are pebbles inside. The boyfriend decided to play a prank. Seryozha looks at the grown man and respectfully asks: “Mister, what are you, stupid?”
I understand that it’s difficult to ask our government this question openly, and that it wouldn’t answer. Or, to be more precise, in place of an answer it would arrange some sort of despicable set-up, and explain it away by the need to “protect the national identity on the day of the holiday of the State Flag”. But the analogy suggests itself, because the population is fed up with the incompetence and insolence of the negligent and thieving state apparatus.
Our people are separated from the government. Solidly, soundly, professionally and, unfortunately, lastingly. The elections, as everyone knows full-well, are a sham; the courts, forgive me dear reader, but a decent person wouldn’t wish them on his worst enemy; the media has become a doormat, their commentary directed upwards reminiscent of a letter with no concrete address, simply “to grandpa, in the village…” A citizen is like Robinson in an uninhabited community, with a single difference: our citizens have a boat. Her foreign travel passport, with which she can leave Azerbaijan, the country unburdened by good sense and blessed by the Vatican. And they are leaving, some with joy, some wronged and with grief.
At a check-up, an intelligent, beautiful young woman, the mother of two wonderful children was discovered to have cancer. The doctor told her that there could be no delay, an operation needed to be performed right away. She and her spouse are teachers. The operation itself will cost four thousand, and then still more money will be needed for treatment. They just don’t have the money, because as honest people, they didn’t take bribes, didn’t ask, didn’t extort. All their relatives, like them, live day-to-day. None of them have extra money. What’s to be done? They have no hope of help from the government, the Minister of Health’s surname – Shiraliyev. Everything is clear to everyone. They go to the bank and take out a loan at exorbitant interest rates. They take out four, if they live long enough, they’ll pay back seven. They don’t grumble – they’ve gotten used to it.
People don’t choose their homeland. We wound up with something “special”. Or did we choose this for ourselves? Which is true, the former, or the latter?
