I've seen happy Romanians

Imagine you're living in a country not very different from Italy. You can breath the corruption in the air, the great public works cost three times more than anywhere else and are never finished and the winners of the public auctions are decided by a phone call. The press - when not "porniphicated" - is declared by the authorities "a menace for the national security" and the opposition - when it's not the government's accomplice - is only patient and waiting for the electoral wheel to turn in its favor.

We're in crisis, of course, and your daily life is bombarded by a sense of imminent apocalypse. In such a way as to keep you from reacting to those measures, as a matter of fact indispensable, in order to "face the global crisis". What's the problem in incrementing the taxes from 19% to 24%?! Or in lowering the salaries of the public workers by one quarter, cutting their possibility of being paid for the overtime work?! With pensions 15% lower we won't die, won't we?!

The president of the republic has, in fact, suggested a solution: find yourself a second job. That's a perfect solution for all those lazy people who hardly deserve their minimum wage of 150 Euros, and, why not, for all those retired people who receive the minimum pension of 80 Euros a month. But, most of all, it's a perfect solution for those plaintive teachers, to whom the government had promised an increase of 50% on their wages adopting a specific Law (the 221 Law) on that, only to surprise them after with a wave of cut salaries and dismissals. As he was into it, the government thought he should follow the European trend and raised the pension age to 60-64 years, he also cut some "fake" invalidity pension (as he put it) and some social assistance here and there. This all happened by getting the country in debt for the next (who knows how many) generations to an organization, which, for the Romanians, starts to have the meaning of F.amine, M.isery, I.solation. The final paradox is that the Parliament you elected has voted a minor tax of 5% for all the basic food products and the absence of further taxation for the lowest pensions. But he understood right away to have made a mistake and, after being mocked at by The Economist, changed his mind.

So, if your salary isn’t enough for you to pay your mortgages, your debts, your bills and also something to eat, you’re certainly not alone and the choices you have are several:

      A.   Leave the country and go abroad, as more than 3 million Romanians have done. It’s one of the most common choices. Definitely a trend. It’s nothing new to find out about the immigration of peasants, nurses, prostitutes, workers, not even Roma people, students or the recent waves of thousands of young doctors, escaping from the flooding ship of Romanian public health care. The immigration has opened new horizons. In Grate Britain, for example, groups of minors, some of which nine years old, have been found working on onion plantations, being literally slaved, forced to work at a temperature of 0 degrees, without water nor food. But, if you’re too old to immigrate, you can

      B.   Protest, as the teachers, the militaries, the policemen and the penitentiary guardians have done, because they couldn’t imagine themselves living in another country so they chose to resist and protest. As they never did before. The 27th of October 2010, in spite of the rain, they organized the most participated march since communism and the 1989 revolution, with 30.000 workers going to the streets to ask the Parliament to overturn the government, by voting the censorship motion called B.U.B.A., from the initials of the leaders of the government party (Basescu, Udrea, Boc, Anastase). And if the parliamentary ways deceive you, as, in fact, the motion didn’t succeed in overturning the government, but did overturn the hopes of an impoverished people, you can still chose

      C.   To make a hunger strike, like the woman who became the icon of this autumn’s Romanian protests, the teacher Cristina Anghel (51 years), who, feeling herself humiliated by her own government, quitted eating, waiting the 221 Law on teachers’ salaries to be applied. After 70 days of useless but moving battle, Mrs. Anghel understood she was a believer and didn’t want to commit suicide. It wouldn’t have been useful anyway. But not everybody thinks as she does. So, a solution can also be

      D.   Committing suicide, which is what many retired people do, because they don’t afford to pay their own medicines and survive, or fathers that are being chased by creditors. It’s a solution chosen also by children and teenagers abandoned by their emigrated parents. But if violence isn’t your choice, you can

      E.   Resist and hope, like the tens of thousands of believers waiting for a miracle, who crowded to touch the holy bones of a saint and fragments of the Holy Cross, being hosted at the Mitropoly of Bucharest.

The choice is yours!

At this point you’ll think the country you imagined to live in is a real inferno. It wouldn’t be fair to make you think this way. Just like a famous Romanian broadcast titled, „I’ve seen happy Romanians”. One example for all, Silviu Raileanu, an unemployed 53 year old, who, after attending a contest, has won one loaf of bread a day, for the rest of his life. Mr. Raileanu, freed of any worries for the future, notices placidly, „The circus is on televison, the bread, I already have it.”