I have a dream

The headline is the beginning of a speech Martin Luther King delivered in 1963 by the Lincoln monument. He dreamed of a united American nation, when vicious governors will be no longer able to use courts and bans to prevent people from taking one another hand by hand. King spoke of brothers and sisters with a different color of skin. There has never been racial discrimination in Ukraine, but there still is a loathsome policy of playing on differences between people.

In these December days full of uncertainty but rife with emotions, there is a desire to speak about exalted feelings and remarkable people. We raised a huge pompous curtain of well-worn velvet and suddenly saw a real country that lives by ideals and base passions, ready to leap forward and stick again in the warm mud of a native quagmire. We are different. But differences in thoughts, reactions, and goals are not a banality which both clever and stupid people keep saying day by day. It is a condition for survival in today’s world. Dissimilarity of views and unity of principles is the formula of a prosperous society. We are aware that it is mindless and terrible to forcibly baptize atheists or convert people to a different faith. But we have been doing this very thing for almost a quarter of a century. On a signal from the domestic and foreign political elites, the government periodically changes the magnetic poles that keep it in orbit and begins to resort to proselytism, i.e., instilment of its persuasions. It relies on little-known pushy and cynical people skilled in bribing, blackmailing and threatening, rather than on intellectuals and social group leaders. These people form a numerical majority in councils and other bodies of authority by boosting the “for” and slashing the “against” factors. But will the ship be more stable if the crew has rushed to one board? The projects of knocking together a majority can overturn not only a fragile party vessel, but also everything in this country – as it happened with Volodymyr Lytvyn’s ZaEdU bloc, which became a prologue to the first Maidan. Then was the turn of Viktor Yushchenko’s Nasha Ukraina (Our Ukraine), which broke up much to the delight of opponents. Now it is happening with Viktor Yanukovych’s party, an insatiable cuckoo chick in the nest of Ukrainian democracy.

Society is again saying to its politicians: gentlemen, do not pile up your property and personnel on one board. We are losing dynamic stability. Look over the barricades that have made Kyiv a visual aid for lectures on “February 1917.” There are mo Israeli snipers, Swedish terrorists, or the EU money which Ms. Catherine Ashton has brought in a purse for the “blood-thirsty” opposition. Instead, there are traces of our stupidity’s DNA on the scar of every protestor. Social protests are not matchsticks – you strike once and kindle the flame of revolution. They are, rather, a process of plutonium accumulation. A critical mass will immediately trigger a chain reaction of fission. Ukraine’s “top managers” have been forming this mass of protest in the past three years. They have been slapping entrepreneurs’ cheeks with a new tax code, teasing the elderly with a non-starter pension reform, and drugging the young with Dmytro Tabachnyk’s textbooks. One party has assumed the right to decide destinies, write laws, distribute money – in a word, it has brought us back to the times of a single governing and guiding force. The circle has closed up on barricades. You wanted them, you got them. The only point is that while those in power will answer for the consequences of their own policy, those in unlimited power will do so immensely. Why not commit to memory the lessons of the 20th century, the fates of Nicholas II, Nicolae Ceausescu, Slobodan Milosevic, and Muammar Gaddafi – the people who had accumulated enormous power but remained unaware that they had also focused on themselves the hatred of those dissatisfied with their absolutism? One has to pay for the comforts of autocracy with great personal disadvantages. This life, you know…

The dying-out “divide and rule” policy is leaving us a bad legacy as well as an important lesson. It is time to see society the way it really is, without creating the illusion of regional, ethnic, or religious like-mindedness. And without pulling the blanket of power, which may turn into a shroud one day.

We do not know how the Maidan and the rebellious December 2013 will change this country. Maybe, the current regime will continue to agonize and will try, as Konstantin Chernenko (do you remember him?) did, to look alive, even though it has already stepped into oblivion. Maybe, the winds of change will radically change the outlines of our economic and political dunes. But there will be no erstwhile peace of mind. Impartial analysts are saying: we have exhausted all resources of the post-Soviet model – from the illusion of an “unbreakable friendship of peoples” to the rotten pipes and wires laid by socialist emulation winners. Did we not see the decay of our material world known as infrastructure and the decomposed flesh of communist ideas that have become the weapon of the national bourgeoisie? We saw and sensed it. But we did so down below – not in the blue abode of the soaring vultures that descend to the grounds only to fill their stomachs. And now it is time for us to feel the earth beneath our feet, assess the scale of ruin in our brains and throughout this country.

We have seen that we are a nation, a social, cultural, and spiritual community of people, united by just a territory of residence and, to some extent, some thoughts and impulses. The political system has failed to meet our main demand – to protect and support the integrity and original nature of society. Instead of doing this very necessary work, the state machinery has triggered a rivalry of corporations. The institutions of power came to serve them, not us. They have been trading off this country’s land and sovereignty, stifling the national language and culture. They have destroyed justice and proclaimed the unconditional supremacy of money over all the other values. The system of amoral rule has been in the making over all the 22 years of independent Ukraine and has reached a critical mass today. Thank God, the metaphor borrowed from nuclear physics still remains a metaphor and a real explosion can be averted if, of course, we have enough willpower and wisdom to correct mistakes. As a marriage is formed by an agreed-upon intention, rather than by cohabitation, so a nation is shaped on the basis of the fundamental values that suit those who look westward and eastward. The transparency of power, the justice of courts, freedom in all its lawful applications, and many other things said a thousand times at public rallies and in conference halls, are the things that all sound-minded people wish to have. What does this have to do with idle talk about a Donetsk worker who is forced to live in poverty due to the loss of Russian orders or a Vinnytsia cheese-maker who will have to eat up his own product? What the protesting Ukrainians demand is not bread and circuses. No foreign loans, gas price cuts, or import duties are needed to fulfill their wishes. It is only necessary to share power and let dissent into where intellect is needed.