How we lost faith and why we must recover it

When asked why young people want to leave Romania, citizens list three reasons: lack of trust in the authorities, corruption – which is also a form of deception of trust in equal rules for all – and third, low living standards, which ultimately translates into distrust of the future.

The loss of confidence, the feeling that there is nothing left to do, are the main causes of disruption in the social fabric, with all the ensuing bad consequences : soaring emigration levels, plummeting levels of engagement, a high degree of selfishness and opportunism developing in society.

Just like in an intimate relationship or in purely commercial relations, in the relationship between citizens and the state, trust is hard to gain and easy to lose. Confidence was chipped away at every day, especially during these last years of democratic regress. They destroyed it methodically, from top to bottom, the powerful of the day or the most insignificant officials.

The feeling that the state works against its citizens has seeped down into the deepest layers of society, and is ubiquitous. The Colectiv and Caracal cases, the anti-judiciary assault mounted in the Dragnea era, the government of national shame, the embarrassing reality that a sub-mediocre politician like Viorica Dăncilă leads the government from the prime minister’s position, all together undermined the foundation of trust in politicians, state, and key institutions.

Then there are the numerous daily horrors, big and small, which have become part of the sordid landscape of a dysfunctional state. We often have the unpleasant feeling that nothing is working properly, from hellish traffic jams and a lack of highways, to hospital dramas or the disaster in education.

In short, the vital infrastructure of the state has reached a critical point.

To the already gloomy picture above is completed by media campaigns carried out with the almost declared purpose of destroying the trust in institutions and in the rule of law, a phrase derided and derided in plain sight.

At the beginning of the school year I saw surreal images with students from Caracal, former colleagues of Alexandra, with Luiza’s mother, and the school principal behaving as in a horror movie.

Despite available evidence and testimonies, they all repeated in chorus that they did not believe the official version according to which the two teenagers were abducted, raped and killed by Gheorghe Dincă.

All these hapless people, to be pitied for the disorientation and confusion in which they are mired, are first and foremost the victims of corrupt politicians and of a failed state in large areas of Romania.

The masses of media terrorists also contribute massively to this situation every evening. The mercenaries of the cheap and the sensational keep important segments of society in their web of manipulations and lies.

Several irresponsible televisions have completed the disaster. For weeks, their favorite topic has been the state’s conspiracy against its citizens. By ventilating the most irrational and phantasmagorical scenarios, the TV stations of the moghuls inject even deeper into the head of people the disease of distrust of anything and everything.

This is what Ghiță and Voiculescu’s belated revenge shows: the undermining of confidence in everything that destroyed them, the demolition of justice, the torpedoing of key institutions, the dismantling of the rule of law. What the politicians started, they are finishing.

Nothing is more vulnerable than a disbanded state, adrift, with authority in dissolution and citizens who see no other personal solution other than leaving the country. In situations of economic crisis or security, when solidarity and confidence in the state play an important role, crippled states like Romania surrender unconditionally. Certain victims.

In the long term, we, the citizens of atomized states, are condemned to administer only poverty and chaos.

The solution can only come from each of us. I recently spoke with a G4Media.ro reader, who felt unjustly treated, hunted by traffic cops, frustrated that they only catch the small offenders, while the big ones always slip away. Things are not quite like that. We have enough evidence of this.

But I fully agree with him when he says that we all have the duty and obligation to do something to change the system: “The profound change can only begin here. From the change of mentality, from the education of the conscience and from the cultivation of the civic sense in each individual. The system is only the average of the collective consciousness of individuals. That is why we have the leaders we deserve, in the image and likeness of the people. Not on the system as a whole, but on each part of it, until it implodes by domino effect (as in PSD) ”

The concrete instrument by which we can speed up change are, of course, elections.

The biggest challenge in the coming elections is to restore confidence in the state, in institutions and in democracy. For this reason the opposition has an obligation to say from now on who will be the people, the projects, the measures with which it wants to restore to the Romanians the belief that their country has a future. They are not allowed to play with our hopes, few as they are.

Restoring trust looks like a difficult long-term mission. It depends on each one of us whether the operation will succeed or we will record a new historical failure, from which I do not know if we will ever be able to recover .

We all need a little naivety and some idealism, no matter how stupid we might seem. But let us not be ashamed of them, that is the only way we can go forward. The day we all become pessimists, a compact flock of future emigrants, will be a very doomed day.

We cannot get everyone out of the country, no matter how dreadful the lack of perspective now seems, no matter how great the distrust in our destiny is.

And love, as irrational, and pure emotion as it is, needs confidence to grow. In the absence of faith in something, in the future and in our power to change it for the better, we will not even be able to build a fragile relationship around us, let alone a country.

Traducerea: Ruxandra Stoicescu