What Requiring Minds Want to Know?
At the full risk of being declared a preacher in the wrong pulpit, I write.
Greatness lies in simplicity, so this text is simple. And I don't even have the time to write briefly, so I'm writing at length.
I'm a member of an international institute where ideas and visions for the future are discussed, and every year before Christmas they send out inspiring texts based on facts, statistics and open minds.
This year's text inspired me to write this one, which, although it's posted in the politics section, isn't about politics. Politics is only the instrument for making visions real, and that's why this text found its place here. As of today, even though I don't know politics and am absolutely unaligned, I'm also a moderator of the politics forum. The whole point lies precisely in my previous sentence — politics is the instrument for making ideas real. Me, I know ideas.
Does Macedonia have an idea and a vision for the future (the EU and NATO are not an idea and a vision; they're a need and a short-term resolution)? Is "open mind" an epithet that exists in Macedonia? Do we know... where we're going? What collective memory and values will we leave as a legacy to the new generations?
Ah, I know... big questions call for big investments... and I'm not the smartest one around; most likely I'll be just one more preacher in the wrong pulpit.
But if, for a moment, we forget our existential problems and free ourselves from the shackles of labels (a changeable category anyway), my sincere hope is that those beautiful heights, romantic dramas, warm lakes, rich tables, mathematical progressions and ideal aspirations will win over the mind, and the road for ideas and visions will be open.
When Plato wrote his Republic, he was writing about an idea. Thomas More in Utopia and Tommaso Campanella in The City of the Sun — the same. They wrote about ideas. Today, those ideas are the foundation of modern societies. Thoughts travel into the future, they make the impossible possible, and new values are born. That's how America was built — an open mind, an idea and a vision for the millennia to come. The Democrats and the Republicans just follow those ideas.
Today, here, we invoke Alexander, yet we abandon his idea of an open society. We build highways and get as far as Gradsko, but not to Thessaloniki. We build railways and get as far as St. Jovan Osogovski, but not to Sofia. We travel to Tetovo, but we leave Tirana by the wayside. We go to see Ceca, but we don't go to Belgrade.
Strange ideas, these.
But let me get back to my story — I'm convinced that open minds thrive in Macedonia. But what do those minds want to know?
This is as far as I got, and here I stopped. There's no answer to that question. The open minds I once admired in Macedonia are sealed today in a jar of plums. They exist on the margins, and some new people have created some new values.
No, that's wrong.
So, I wish... that our writers, actors, professors, scientists, intellectuals and bright minds of every kind would return to where they were — to the stage — and do what God gave them: use their minds and give us back our ideas. Give us back our visions and teach us that tomorrow will be different from today. Give us back our heroes and teach us to fly, to be train engineers, doctors or miners. America called on its intellectuals to help in the greatest crisis; it didn't call on the banks. Columbia, Cornell, Yale and Harvard did their part.
And now, and here... my mind is asking the same of Macedonia.
Yours just needs to... take flight.
Thunderbird