It gave us every chance in the world: for a plant manager to become President, a college graduate to set up the Coca Cola Company, the pensioner to subsist and sell cigarettes, former criminals to control the whole nation’s economy, underpaid engineers to become businessmen, and the citizens of Ukraine the chance to become inhabitants of a democratic European country.
Representatives of the Diaspora can return to “mother Ukraine” and with tears in their eyes kiss the land of their ancestors, and they can invest millions of dollars here.
Military men can defend the independence of their native land or retire from the service because they are not paid.
Functionaries can work honestly and conscientiously or they can steal millions.
Jews can travel to Israel, and they can build synogogues and send their children to Jewish schools.
The Orthodox can build cathedrals and take over cathedrals from other patriarchates.
Former teachers of scientific communism in their day confirmed that the Soviet student could never become a specialist without mastering Marxism-Leninism, and those who did not accomplish this important task were expelled. Now they can expound any theory they like or even teach Ukrainian history and pound their chests, demonstrating that the Ukrainian student can never become an engineer without mastering their nation’ s history.
Communist leaders can repent of the genocide their party committed against its own people, and they can struggle for power hiding under slogans about equality, brotherhood, justice, and, of course, independence.
Ukrainian culture, its distinctiveness, can gather the grains of sand of their national-spiritual heritage, and even declare on television that the Russian language has no right to exist in independent Ukraine.
One can read the Ukrainian poetry of Vasyl Stus, and one can refuse to learn Ukrainian.
Independence can make peace between hryvnias and dollars or between poured steel and the harvest, and it can look at itself and bathe in its own national consciousness.
Photo by Leonid Bakka,The Day:
INDEPENDENCE IS ALREADY DELIVERING CIRCUSES. WHEN WILL IT BRING THE BREAD?







