Being Ukrainian Is Neither Classy nor Cool

Yes, we each choose our own path. Some try to make their way in the world, listening only to their own conscience at the turning points of their destiny and ignoring their friends’ warnings, such as “You’ll lose” or “What will you gain?” Others say that a world based on conscience is a lie that a paunchy priest preaches in church. These people thoroughly pack up their conscience and shove it under the bed. They live by the principles that the end justifies the means and that winners are above judgment. “I am suffering, trying to establish new life, and when I achieve something, my kith and kin will appreciate and forgive me that I was not with them and did not share their petty joys and sorrows.”

Most Ukrainians think now that, to achieve something, they must leave this poor, robbed, bureaucrat and deputy-dominated Ukraine of which you are ashamed when you are abroad – ashamed for its poverty, hopelessness, and the tears in your eyes when you think about the future of your child. This is what everybody talks and writes about.

Why then does nobody write about the broken destinies of those who relish the thought that they will achieve social recognition and legal status on “the Turkish, English, or Israeli shore,” and of those whom they abandon here, of their children for the sake of whom ostensibly their fathers and mothers climb into the skies on airplanes?

Yes, these people are quite right when they say they have the right to seek a better fate. The are as a rule educated and erudite, they know how to make it, sleep little, not lazy, and have a good command of a foreign language. They consider themselves, first, men and women of the world, not of Ukraine only. This is also true. Yes, the world has really become globalized, and our hearts bleed not only for Ukrainian children in the provinces, where 13-year-olds read by syllables, but also for the Afghan 5 year-olds who will never learn to read but, instead, deftly handle a Kalashnikov.

But why do such parents kiss alien children easily to a fault and want to be active and well-wishing eyewitnesses of other people’s destinies, while leaving their own children and kin to fates?

Yes, the son is glad when his job-seeking father comes back presenting him a toy or a mobile phone. But before this, he asked his mother a sacramental question, “Mom, why isn’t my Daddy with me?” I think this son will say in future, “Yes, you got into difficult life circumstances. I can understand that. But, still, you were stupid and not fully aware of who you were and what you lived for in this world.”

When a father tries but fails to find a job either in Ukraine or in Europe, hiding from the outside world in a 25-pound coat with a caption “I’m leaving my son to his own future,” somebody must stay behind with his son in Godforsaken Ukraine to spare his father’s blushes abroad. In poor Ukraine, the son is looked after by his mother, also a housewife, nanny, teacher, and playmate in the most preposterous boyish games, who have to raise him to be a full-fledged member of the future “foreign” society. Also staying behind are alien men and women who shower him with good and sincere words, take care of him, and on whom he tries to lean when his mother cannot be by his side.

This kind of fatherless and motherless Ukrainian child will not want to be born either in or out of Ukraine. For Ukrainian children do not need parents who try to present their split personality as a norm of life, who think that the soulless money they have earned in an alien land will replace a sincere, good, and trusting family relationship. This is further proved by the plummeting birth rate both in Ukraine and in Ukrainian families in the West.

Today’s Ukraine does not expel its citizens. The Soviet regime used to literally oust those who made up the first and second waves of emigration. The emigration of today has a slogan of its own, “A fish seeks deeper water, a man seeks better places.” Contemporary former Ukrainians, who have managed to receive citizenship of other countries, do not suffer from any marasmus of nostalgia that the previous years’ emigrants might have. They begin to erase Ukraine from their memory during their very first successful trip abroad and never mourn separation from their homeland and the world of their childhood. They consider that luck smiled on them as they left.

Unfortunately, the new county, the new place of residence, does not bring happiness, for we are all different, first, in terms what kind of people we are and, only secondly, by the color of our passport.

Most Ukrainian citizens lean toward the West only because they wish to gain access to Western standards of consumption. The need in intellectual standards usually comes later, if at all. So if an individual hates the country where he was born and raised, he will never be able to love another, even a more stable and prosperous, country. For hatred can beget only hatred. And the new society rejects its new prospective citizens not because they rob them of work, the established conventions, decorum, or property, but because they are loaded with hatred. For inner human decency does not depend on the language the identity card is filled out in.

Being Ukrainian is neither classy nor cool. It is classy and cool to be American. Being Ukrainian means asking the eternal questions, “Who am I? Where shall I go? What shall I teach my children? Where shall I lead Ukraine, this Kateryna of Shevchenko’s poem who “knew how to show her brows and eyes but didn’t know how to achieve happiness in this world?”

Those who now seek a better life outside the Fatherland do not care about the destiny of Ukraine, for they do not love it. They do not sympathize with it, using their passport Ukrainian nationality only to make their names appear in the press. They shun and despise Ukraine, as an “urban” son would shun his country mother. A son like this will give money to and hire other people to do the housework, but this mother would be the happiest one in the world if her son found time, rolled up his sleeves, and did the work himself.

Such people forget that mobility can be manifested as the ability of man to rapidly leave his home while fleeing from himself, for it remains unclear whether it makes sense to change places.