One of the best Romanian journalists wrote, a few days ago, a very good article. He says a few things that I believe to be true for a long time already.
In just one phrase: the general situation is bad in Romania if we take a theoretical perspective, but has never been so relatively good in practice. That's the simple truth.
We like to compare Romania with the country as it was 70 or 80 years ago, forgetting that inter-war Romania never had the international position of 2010's Romania and failing to see the discrepancies between the income levels of then and now. To complete that, some of us remind about the Communist Romania and a few of them believe it was better than today, ignoring in good science the absurd level of social control imposed by the regime. And also the discrepancies mentioned above. On the other hand, I don't imply things are good - they are relatively good. I know a lot of people making huge sacrifices in order to have a apparently normal life, and generally they are indebted for long years.
By the way, there is a very interesting site I recommend you. It is called GapMinder and you can access it by the link available on my blog. You can see on that site the differences of income levels and health for a certain country in long periods of time. Check out what happened to Romania since 1800 and see where we are now.
We like to complain. We complain a lot about everything here and about things getting worse. While bad signs do exist, the culture of complaining is new. Its origins can be placed immediately after 1990, thus immediately after the things began changing for the good. But this is not the only thing. Complaining about the "disastrous" situation of Romania was also the main weapon used by socialist politicians during the presidential elections last year. Interesting enough, it was also one of the instruments of control used by the former communist intelligence agencies.
And if you watched some of the most unfortunately prominent Romanian TV stations in 2009, what you could see was just aggressive complaining about the existing state of things. With a very political conclusion: "Băsescu is guilty!". Truth be told, the president might be guilty in some measure, but the owners of these TV stations and those who payed them , rather Socialists of sort, are much more so. A few millions of Romanians left the country in the past 20 years. I seriously doubt the fact that the premises for their emigration were created since November 2004.
I want to remind you, my dear readers, that stranum53 gave up his television set in 1998. It is the very same in the present. He did it for a good and simple reason: the reality he saw with his own eyes did not match anymore the "reality" depicted on the TV screens. I invite you to watch life through your own eyes, not through the eyes of some TV station and/or politician, whatever his name might be.
I also invite you not to take my word for granted and to check out for yourself. Your comments are, needless to say, welcome.
In just one phrase: the general situation is bad in Romania if we take a theoretical perspective, but has never been so relatively good in practice. That's the simple truth.
We like to compare Romania with the country as it was 70 or 80 years ago, forgetting that inter-war Romania never had the international position of 2010's Romania and failing to see the discrepancies between the income levels of then and now. To complete that, some of us remind about the Communist Romania and a few of them believe it was better than today, ignoring in good science the absurd level of social control imposed by the regime. And also the discrepancies mentioned above. On the other hand, I don't imply things are good - they are relatively good. I know a lot of people making huge sacrifices in order to have a apparently normal life, and generally they are indebted for long years.
By the way, there is a very interesting site I recommend you. It is called GapMinder and you can access it by the link available on my blog. You can see on that site the differences of income levels and health for a certain country in long periods of time. Check out what happened to Romania since 1800 and see where we are now.
We like to complain. We complain a lot about everything here and about things getting worse. While bad signs do exist, the culture of complaining is new. Its origins can be placed immediately after 1990, thus immediately after the things began changing for the good. But this is not the only thing. Complaining about the "disastrous" situation of Romania was also the main weapon used by socialist politicians during the presidential elections last year. Interesting enough, it was also one of the instruments of control used by the former communist intelligence agencies.
And if you watched some of the most unfortunately prominent Romanian TV stations in 2009, what you could see was just aggressive complaining about the existing state of things. With a very political conclusion: "Băsescu is guilty!". Truth be told, the president might be guilty in some measure, but the owners of these TV stations and those who payed them , rather Socialists of sort, are much more so. A few millions of Romanians left the country in the past 20 years. I seriously doubt the fact that the premises for their emigration were created since November 2004.
I want to remind you, my dear readers, that stranum53 gave up his television set in 1998. It is the very same in the present. He did it for a good and simple reason: the reality he saw with his own eyes did not match anymore the "reality" depicted on the TV screens. I invite you to watch life through your own eyes, not through the eyes of some TV station and/or politician, whatever his name might be.
I also invite you not to take my word for granted and to check out for yourself. Your comments are, needless to say, welcome.
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