Shopping is a great exercise and dead simple. You browse, you pick, you pick more and then you buy. Easy peasy if you have learned how to do it.
Sixteen years ago I went shopping with two girls, one from Estonia and the other from Slovakia. Both countries had just left communism behind and Slovakia was about to split from the Chech Republic. The girls had never before set a foot inside a western department store. As I walked in the store and started browsing I soon realised that I had left my new friends behind in complete despair at the entrance. They did not know where to look and where to start. The Slovakian girl was a devout Catholic. She kept on shaking her head. ‘All this choice was just immoral!’ My Estonian friend kept clapping her hands about the diverse range of shoes she could choose from (under Soviet rule you were lucky to find any shoe after waiting in a line for weeks, days or hours).
Last year I saw my Estonian friend again. She works in Brussels as a diplomat and her husband is a journalist. She had a fancy laptop and a blackberry, her baby boy sat in the latest model of the Bugaboo. She was happy. I could not help but think back about that day in 1993 in the Debenhams in Liverpool and smile.
How sweet is the taste of freedom. How fortunate that Estonia was able to join the EU.
Estonia celebrates its 18th year of independence today.
Beatpolitics is created by me, Beatrijs Overdijkink. I am a writer, originally from Amsterdam, lived in London for a while and just moved to Prague. I write about political subjects big and small. Feel free to comment on anything I say. I love a good debate!
Marjaneh | 08-Sep-09 at 5:19 pm | Permalink
The great very sad “joke” is the fact that there isn’t a choice. It’s the same rubbish with extra “twists”. Everywhere.
What this has to do with “freedom”, really beats me.
beatrijs | 08-Sep-09 at 10:09 pm | Permalink
I guess you mean that the bugaboo and blackberry don’t have anything to do with real freedom and you are right. That is just a superficial observation. I should have said that the life of my friend improved dramatically by being able to live where she wants, being able to talk freely and study the subjects she wanted, being able to vote and stand for elections herslef when she wants to. And in a way the material stuff does matter because when the Russians were ruling her country Estonians had to stand in line for hours for one pair of shoes at least now there is choice. May be our choices got slightly out of hand, but I prefer our kind of choice above the ‘choices’ that were forced on people by communism.
Marjaneh | 13-Sep-09 at 2:05 am | Permalink
‘Got it!
I just wish we could find a “medium”. These extremes of standing in line, and I do remember seeing over a mile of people waiting to purchase a tomatoe in Moscow, and then having the illusion of abundance, e.g there are over 300 varieties of tomatoes in the world and ironically enough, the biggest collection of seeds is in Moscow, and what do we get? An abundance of 6 commercially viable 6, which don’t taste of anything, not grown in soil.
I wish I could remember the exact quote of Reinaldo Arenas. It was something along the lines of : under communism , you have to clap, under capitalism you are allowed to scream.
A democracy cannot exist without active citizenship.
Apart from that, I’ve always preferred the word ” liberty. And yes, I also am pleased for your friend.