You can not sedate all the things you hate
are in Łódź to review a friend, Jarrek, which met in 2000 in India. Invited to attend a conference in philosophy, we had, unknowingly, the same plane from Amsterdam to Calcutta. Landed at three in the morning, we had to find a car waiting for the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture. On leaving the airport, however, there was no trace of our Indian guests and that was how we met, wandering in a parking lot in search of their car. Lacking this, we took a taxi together to achieve Golpark and through a city already in full swing for the arrival of the goods they supply the markets and shops.
Raised agnostic, in the nineties Jarrek studied in Sweden where he became a Lutheran. Today in Poland, his point of view, Protestant, liberal, eccentric, and is therefore especially valuable. The work of the conference alternate with long conversations and walks, we took an afternoon the monsoon in the city center, which was quickly flooded. The streets disappeared beneath two feet of water, but we found a taxi driver in bold evening brought us back to the Institute. There, with their shoes and pants rolled up above the knee, I understood why the buildings in Calcutta are the main entrance floor of a few steps to the road surface.
This time the arrangement is much simpler: Jarrek is waiting at the station and takes me to his house, where we expect Magda, his wife, and Szymon, their child. Their apartment is in one of the top ten rectangular planes, thousands of them, surrounding the cities of the Soviet empire. In the Czech Republic had not impressed me negatively because they were usually painted with attractive colors and surrounded flower beds neat and tall trees. In Poland, however, exposes the neglect of the poor quality of construction materials. My friends are both university professors, but house prices are too high for them and, therefore, have withdrawn into a suburb. The common areas like the stairs are not owned condominiums and are left in total abandonment, all the care of owners for their homes occurs behind the heavy doors of the apartments.
Jarrek step with Magda and three days to speak even though we've written often, they are five years that we meet and the issues to be discussed with the utmost urgency, we seem endless. The evening we are at the table until late, drinking vodka Zubrowka (flavored with the herb that is preferred by the European bison living in the Bialowieza National Park) and called Krupnik, a honey liquor, but the euphoria is due, above all, that the cartel defascistizzazione found by comparing the failure of the corridors of power in post-war with the non desovietizzazione in contemporary Poland, the economic and political patronage, the lack of civic sense and a disregard for the public good in both countries. I was told of the fears that Russia still arouses public opinion Polish auction to Germany which is still widespread, the support that Poland has since the peaceful revolution in Ukraine in 2004, receiving it from Russia for alleged expansionism, superficial attitude of many Poles towards the European Union, seen only as the bearer of economic well-being and shopping centers. Jarrek disputes the term "Eastern Europe", referring to Poland and the Czech Republic, denied that Russia is part of Europe, he explains that once occupied his country, was the abolition of private property that the Soviets have eradicated Poles any personal interest and, therefore, the very possibility of democratic demands. Inevitably, we end up talking about Locke and the right to property, the link between Protestantism and democracy, Italian amoral familism and the Polish, the first educational reforms undertaken in Poland, and Italy will remain dreams.
"We can not sedate all the things you hate," is written on a wall near Wrocław. So we talk about it, confident of success, with this sort of exorcism, to alleviate the weight.
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