From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng (Original Message) Sent: 4/30/2005 10:21 AM
April, 29, 2005
What happens to mankind?
One woman, not having managed to get into a bus, was walking by a dusty road, KamAZs were passing by, but nobody gave her a lift. At last, some KamAZ stopped; she was invited to get in. She sighed with simplification and, remembering the experience of hippie, complained to the driver, that she had been walking for two hours, and nobody wanted to give her a lift.
After these words the driver stopped at once and told her to go out.
The moral, which she realized was the following, the world had changed, and had changed to the worst.
Certainly, it is possible to consider to the worst and best side to be a conditional character. But I can also ascertain that for the last twenty years the mankind has changed not to the best. There are also good changes. But I ask: whether good changes are a mask for bad ones?
The matter is that our life is a road with two-sided traffic; the same as the road, on which this woman was walking. There are good and bad changes in it. But if we look closely look, we shall see, that all "good" changes have a very superficial character, and "bad" ones are fundamental.
Let's look at our time from 1987. What do we see? The first thing, evident to us, is well and fashionably dressed people. But thus, having peered at their faces, we shall see that they are very strange people. There are many young people among them, but young men are, in fact, the same new clothes. We see young people, as Evtushenko used to write, but there is no youth. Look closely, at these young faces, and you will see a mask on them. Just the senior generation has this mask glued on their faces; they have got it together with changes, but the young are born with this mask. Basically we cannot see anything new in these young men, and it does not matter, how attractively they look, an amazing banality is seen in them.
Then we shall see a plenty of computers and every possible techniques. The Internet will delight us. And only having seen closely, how everything this is used, we shall realize, that the mankind degraded rather than has reached any heights. All this techniques hide nonsense of the new bureaucracy structure, emptiness of people, who use it.
We will be amazed, most likely, with advertisements: we even shall find them to be a parameter of progress. We shall see laughing and happy faces in them, and for some moment it will seem to us, that it is new Russia . This is for whom we worked! But… We peer and we find out emptiness. And it seems to me, this advertising emptiness, not conformity of the form and the maintenance is really a symbol of new life in Russia . For the same emptiness is in TV programs. The same emptiness is in news programs. The same emptiness is in politics.
But something really has happened, we say to ourselves. We can by a small shop, as private property has appeared! We come to a shop and we say: can we buy the shop? And we hear from a security guard, "And do not you want to fish?"
There is capitalism everywhere, but everybody is still poor. There is democracy everywhere, but everybody is still deprived of civil rights.
And what is about freedom of speech? In fact it is possible to speak, to write. We call to a television studio, but nobody answers. We write to a newspaper, and we are driven out. Thick magazines are full of something unclear. (Radio "Freedom" and its best commentators say such things that there is a desire to blow up their Prague studio).
There is no freedom of speech even in conversations with simple people in streets! As if all of them have swallowed their tongues: as if they swallowed them together with pies.
At last, having made some attempts to talk to someone in streets, we look up and see… a smiling militiaman. "How?! Again?!" - Yes, again, and still many times.
The American president kisses the Russian president. Everyone is dancing hopak.
And an old woman is walking on that road between dusty machines and crying… What has happened to the mankind?
Andrei Novikov , an independent analyst, for Chechenpress, 29.04.05.
http://chechenpress.co.uk/english/news/2005/04/29/04.shtml
