A convertible joke

I do not remember what luminary of political science uttered this, but it approximately sounded as follows: only a talented person is capable of converting a fact in his life story or any other event into public votes. Something like that.

I don’t know who that luminary of political science meant, but I am ready to guess which of the participants in the current presidential race this axiom fits best of all.

I have known this person for many years. What he likes most of all is to smash cliches and stereotypes.

He did the same this time – he debunked something and suppressed somebody.

Vadym Rabinovych is on the home stretch of his short presidential heat, having gained (at a preliminary estimate) almost the same percentage of Ukrainian votes as Dmytro Yarosh and Oleh Tiahnybok, as well as the drop-out Petro Symonenko, COMBINED.

An absolute explosion of stereotype! The president of the All-Ukrainian Jewish Congress, who has never hidden but, instead, been proud of his origin, a businessman, and an avid media person is outrunning the so-called “ultras.”

Rabinovych puts this down to the recovery of our society. The point is that illness is our imagination of a disease and simulation of its symptoms, phantom-limb pains, rather than a complex biochemical process in the body. We often think that we are ill, and we thus sink still deeper in the malady.

Indeed, we are really recovering because we are rejecting stereotypes, for example, about total xenophobia or intolerance in society.

In my view, Rabinovych won on the day he applied to the Central Election Commission and announced his bid for the Ukrainian mace. He has beaten a stereotype. For I know there still are people who ask, hearing his last name: is it the proverbial Rabinovych, the butt of jokes?

Yes, he is the same because he likes telling jokes almost daily for his Radio Rabinovich FM. He always calls on us to cheer up, stop whimpering, smile, and take pleasure in life – even in this difficult hour.

A person who had lived the first 60 years of his life, as it were a sick joke, experienced and seen very much, suddenly decided to blaze a trail and to smash once and for all the stereotype: Rabinovych, too, can run for the presidency in a country that has proclaimed democracy and equality of all before the law, all the more so if he adds to this his brains, ability to speak and persuade and win such a percentage of support (his campaigners have recorded 6-8 percent in his support in the south and partly in the east, while in some Odesa constituencies he was virtually at Tymoshenko’s heels) that he won’t have to be ashamed before the world and this may come in handy in the parliamentary campaign.

Rabinovych used this percentage to kill the main stereotype which our right-hand neighbors are imposing on us: Ukrainians – in the broadest sense of the word, irrespective of their ethnic origin – are not embittered xenophobes but intelligent, educated, civilized, and attentively-listening people whom even the war and total sadness do not keep from seeing in any person – even one with a name from jokes – a sincere aspiration to help their country and a passion in the eyes and to hear reasonable advice which can really, not theoretically, help this country move towards an “Eastern European Switzerland.”

Rabinovych has just suggested that Ukrainians believe in their own strength and stop relying on those who have promised many times to restructure the country, only to go back on their promises. It is always difficult to adhere to faith, and, alas, we not often learn from deceit. But…

What represents a change is the very fact that any citizen of this country – be it a Russian, an Uzbek, a Tatar or a Jew – does not have a shadow of a doubt that anyone, even Rabinovych, can be heeded and supported.

Vadym Rabinovych has converted his proverbial last name into a public axiom of sorts: everyone can do it, and the choice is yours.

Someone said at a regional forum that Barack Obama, before becoming the US president, was preceded by other black public leaders who, incidentally, not always managed to debunk a public stereotype and sometimes, like Martin Luther King, even sacrificed their life for the idea of universal equality.

This is right, of course. There have been many other precedents in the world, when “non-titular” representatives held topmost governmental offices.

But, as is known for sure now, Ukraine is no longer Russia but not yet the US.

Yet we seem to be taking a tiny step in this direction, too, towards a country of “equal opportunities.” It is still a long way to go, but he who seeks finds.

Democracy is not a tablet – take one and no headache. Of all people, we know that recovery is slow and painful, with mistaken diagnoses, mixed up cardiograms and tests, wrong medicine doses and sluggish nurses unable to change a bedpan in time.

Rabinovych reminds us that it is time to recover.

Let me recall one my most favorite Jewish parables.

An elderly man sits near an oasis at the city entrance, looking at the road. A youth comes up to him and says:

“I’ve never been here. What kind of people live in this city?”

The old man asks in turn:

“And what kind of people live in the city you came from?”

“They are egoistic and wicked people. This is why I was glad to leave that place.”

“You will see the same kind here,” the sitting man said to him.

Some time later another man comes to the same place and asked the same question:

“I’ve just come here. Tell me, old man, what kind of people live in this city?”

The old man asked again in reply:

“Tell me, son, what was the behavior of the people in the city you came from?”

“They were good, hospitable, and noble souls. I had a lot of friends there, and it was so hard to part with them.”

“You will find the same kind of people here,” the old man replied.

A merchant, who was watering his horse nearby, heard both dialogs. And, once the second man stepped aside, he reproached the old man:

“Why did you give these people absolutely different answers to the same question?”

“I did not lie, son, for everybody carries his world in his heart. He who found nothing good in the land from which he came will, moreover, find nothing consolatory here. On the contrary, he who had friends in another city will surely find true and loyal friends here. For, you see, we judge about the people around by what we see and find in them.”

So let us see the bright side in the people, let us walk out of the former type of a city and walk into the latter – God willing.