How did things get here?
I look at tall buildings, beautifully decorated with granite illegally sold from the north, founded on the sweat of a poor laborer working for the wealth of a corrupt one.
I look at entire provinces rejoicing over a piece of bread, and a wealth gap that is growing day by day.
Where are those we brought to power? They might happily rejoice the capitalists and merchants in the security of their salons.
After all, it has always been so. Those in their living rooms, and everyone else in the fields.
There are other living rooms now though, and other fields.
Looking further I saw a refugee being sold like a slave, passing at dawn a wire “Because that’s how it is done”.
In the summer I saw the villagers lose their memory in a two-hundred-euro bed, and in the winter the everyday human being lost for a while in the surface luxury of an expensive neo-inn.
Even if none of them has the money to pay for the electricity. Even if wages remain the same as they were in the 1990s, but at the cost of Vienna.
Where should the ambitious go, where should the dreamer walk, in a place where the “shoulds” and the “nots” blur even the minds of the most optimistic.
I did not want to think anymore.
I looked across.
I saw thousands upon thousands coming from abroad, here be strangers and there be a tool. And they, and them.
Sometimes I looked at the painted mountains, and other times the dug up ones. Crying with the downfall of some remnants of another era.
A little further on, I saw him bathing in the streams of a village in the riverbeds of that proud mountain range, and her who lit candles at night to read for her university.
In need, they will come here one day, looking for something better. But then I laugh bitterly.
‘We have been fighting for this for so many years, and now it’s happening on its own.’
Why?
Why do all these need to happen, while we still won’t see the truth?
A voice no longer entails, neither violence, nor speeches.
I want to take your hand, and you mine, and his. And then let us make up, and maybe then they shall do the same.
Of course you will tell me, “There are other solutions”.
And you will be right. They do well, as long as they fight for peace.
“What peace?” you tell me.
“My peace is a summer afternoon in Argaki” I told you.
And you cried, but I smiled at you.
