The country of missed opportunities

My early morning, winter photo best expresses the overwhelming feeling I feel now. In 1990, as a twelve-year-old child, I was excited to follow the first free parliamentary elections and would have rushed to vote if I had been old enough. I honestly believed that my country was finally catching up with the West and that oppression would fade into a bad memory. I was a child, I believed in miracles. Then living here, reality shattered my dreams and left me with nothing but empty pockets and despair. I write a pro and con list on every subject, and in my current situation, the con has overwhelmed the pro on my own survival, which means I'm in trouble. And not just me, but hundreds of thousands of others. This is now the big crisis, not like 2008, but comparable to 1933. We don't learn. Once again Hungary will suffer heavy losses and its decline will continue. Oh, the death of a nation is not a dramatic act, but a prolonged decay over decades. We have thrown thirty years out of the window. We missed a historic opportunity.

Pity the words have lost their meaning and weight. It is pointless to write, because reality overrides everything. The wheel of history has been turned and the Hungarian nation is falling behind because it no longer has the strength, the knowledge or the will to change. It has simply run out of energetic, virtuous, good-willed people. All that is left are the small people who have been reduced to mass man, consumers, the right wing, oppressible, intimidatable and deceivable. Gone are our great ones. Oh, don't think that the autocrat is a great man, or the other, who went from cadre to somebody, but not a great man. The tragedy is not the territorial loss of the country, but the loss of human greatness! Man has been lost as a shaper of his destiny, as a molder of history, and so, in the absence of thinking men, we are plunging into chaos. The modern politician is nothing more than a servant of capital. He is a glove puppet, betraying his people with a cynical smile on his face, while pushing false populist slogans.

I am a nobody, an artist chronicling a decaying landscape. I have no chance against the greater forces. I have assessed myself, looked around and see my own individual tragedy. I do what I can, but it is a drop in the ocean and in fact ineffective. Perhaps it's time to change my perspective and stop staring at the ground while free-falling and forget about the inevitable impact and death while admiring the sky and the serene blue. What is lost is no more. Why am I hurting my heart and hurting myself with heavy feelings? I am a little man, and it means nothing that I was born with the artist's eye. It is a mounths to accept that even reason is lost, and nothing remains but the panting and inevitable demise of a human animal struggling to survive. Enjoy!