Life is being adorned with unforeseen little Chinese lanterns of the times of trouble. Thanks to them, you can see the light at the end of a tunnel, a black stripe on a zebra’s rump of our existence is changed with a white one, and the light of the Creator beams through the clouds of the Evil one. Being in a continuously grave condition, one will surely stretch his hand to Pythia wearing a Gypsy necklace. Everybody is warmed by a hope to hear – for 20 hryvnias – an accented patter about the inevitable advent of happiness. It is better than reading the forecasts of our print and online media, the sad oracles, which fall daily into a sacred ecstasy of clairvoyance. But, unlike the fortune-telling children of the sun, the Roma will promise you no days of joy. It will be worse than in Greece or Cyprus. We will hold no elections. This country is to break up one of these days. Dictatorship is inevitable. We will have gone extinct by 2050, frozen between Russia and the European Union. We must believe nobody. It is the last parliament. What’s the use of protesting? And so on and so forth. Everybody on the media temple’s porch is looking over the horizons of knowledge.
It is good to predict a general wish or, on the contrary, to respond to all-pervading fears. The hope in the former case and the fear in the latter boost the seer’s rating and confidence in his words. But the most frequently-used way of foretelling the future by means of a third eye is used to state the obvious facts, for example, that prices will be on the rise or the political situation will be aggravated. For, you see, they went down at the moment when the masses “went stupid.”
Alas, I can’t see any other forecasting methods so far. Instead of political scientific and economic analyses with a calm outcome, we keep receiving the epicrises of a lethal outcome. Society will die rather than positively assess its own prospects. Even the authorities, which like so much to put a brave face on a sorry business and radiate optimism that makes up for the outflow of capital, have suddenly gone sad. Even the mayor of a big city is advising people to scram as far as possible from the Titanic steered by his colleagues. What are we supposed to think: he has the gift of foreseeing or he has precise information about the condition of the vertical chain of command?
The paradox is not only in the mayor’s revelations. This country has been swept by a flood of indifference about tomorrow. We still don’t know what we are building, what we are fighting for, and where we are going. But there are clairvoyants galore – a pair on every TV channel and one in each of all kinds of institutions. You come to a saving bank to draw money, only to be told: it is good that you came just now because we don’t know what will happen next month. If you have found a nice sofa in a shop, you’d better buy it straightaway because no new sofas may be delivered or produced, as the manager says to you convincingly. To mention mortgage or an accumulative account is the same as to mention rope in the house of a hanged man. In a word, we have drunk the full cup of the past, cannot see the future, and do not want to live off the present. We prefer to forecast blindly. We could outshine Alfred Hitchcock in our fantasies, but the epoch-making crisis of all-time seers restrains us. Nothing has come true except for some fragments from King Solomon’s parables. Nostradamus pulled the wool over the eyes and the Mayas cheated us with an unfinished calendar. It would be better if the astrologist Globa encoded everything the way Nostradamus did – just to keep his reputation clean.
Oracles with the innate and acquired gift, also known as experts, made a fool of themselves. None of them noticed the symptoms of the USSR collapse, the Chornobyl disaster, the unwillingness of Leonid Kravchuk to join the 1991 abortive coup, the victory of Viktor Yushchenko in the second runoff, the second coming of Viktor Yanukovych onto the Pechersk hills, the victory of Leonid Chernovetsky’s buckwheat bags over the common sense of Kyivites, and many other fateful events. So why do we take the fears and terrors of hedgehogs in the fog as prophesy? Maybe, the terrible monster on their way is, in our eyes, just a scared horse?
JUDGE LYNCH TAKES NO BRIBES
Male individuals have seen in the 100 centuries of civilization that brutalizing a weak one has a bad impact on the stronger sex posterity. If you want to have healthy and sound-minded children, do not resort to violence in the family, office, and other places that your restless ego visits. Therefore, whenever masked boys snowball government, business and constitutional law ladies, one must treat this as hooliganism, not as an act of political revenge. Some countries force the manhandling elements to sweep streets or carry bedpans in rest homes. But, in this case, society mobilizes all the violent ones, no matter whether they belong to the government, the opposition, or the most numerous “protest electorate,” for community service. Journalists and people with a civic flame in their hearts were right to remind the ruling majority men that you cannot be, say, a Party of Regions gentleman – you can only be a true gentleman who does not ask the injured lady to produce her party card before coming to her rescue.
They failed to punish the louts in their own ranks, when they kicked women MPs on duty, and heard an echo. They did not hide ironic grins when their opponents were daubed with crap and paint – so they received a symmetric joy of snowballing. Is this not the result of an unbreakable link between selective justice and selective morality?
Yet there are other matters of concern in addition to the moral face of functionaries. Why were analytical centers established in the internal organs if they are unable to signalize to the head and all the other parts of the state body about the popularity of mob trials against the backdrop of the devaluation of courts? Can’t you see that people are persistently trying to avert governmental interference into their search for justice? Just look into the reports, dear policemen: they are full of score-settling without the slightest participation of Themis. The only reason is that, as is known, Judge Lynch takes no bribes. He can also serve everybody in this country, not only its small part in the money and at the helm.
IS UKRAINE REALLY NOT DEAD YET?
Almost every year, a political song bureau crops up to offer its own translation of the Ukrainian anthem into Russian and to suggest that it be sung in the public places where “comrades” do not understand it. The first impulse is to think that this initiative is exclusively for the benefit of the people who find it easier to pronounce broken Russian, rather than broken Ukrainian, words, and the emotional condition of Ukrainian citizens does not depend on whether the phrase “The Black Sea will smile some day, and Grandfather Dnipro will rejoice, and our Ukraine will mature in a happy destiny” will sound in Ukrainian or Russian. I think the “Russian-speaking people” care about the “matured happy destiny” as much as we do. So I suggest that, as classics used to advise, any absurdity be brought to a logical end. As we are concerned about those who do not speak in general and Ukrainian in particular, let us compose sign language translations and English texts – in a proper way as per international regulations. For when you watch our Cameroon-born Shakhtar guys win a soccer match, your heart bleeds: it will be easier for them to sing “Ukraine’s glory and freedom is not yet dead” in English than in Ukrainian. Under the regional languages law, English would be more appropriate in soccer changing rooms. And let us not forget about the color blind. It is high time to prescribe blue as 70 percent of gray and yellow as 30 percent of gray. It will be a fully recognizable flag. Even watchdogs will be able to discern it because, as is known, they see a black-and-white picture of the world. In a word, we will thus please everybody, as far as national symbols are concerned, and “we will prevail, brothers, in our home country.” That’s the trick.
