Paraphrasing Vonnegut, as part of The Landless Man: No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our governments, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions, music will still be a beautiful thing. and sublime!
Author: Katerina Topallova
Unpredictable economic conditions, increased insecurity, low quality of life and dysfunction of the system are the main drivers and instigators of migration, which is especially pronounced among the younger generations… And all this is reason enough to away from their hearths, homes and homeland in search of better living conditions. More specifically, countries with high levels of corruption promote and encourage migration processes. Seeing such a picture, we have a serious duty and obligation to ask ourselves where is Macedonia in such history? Where does the work lead? Are the scenarios of our survival cataclysmic, regardless of which religion and ethnicity we belong to!?
Perhaps corruption is not a direct driver of migration, although it may encourage people’s desire to migrate. However, corruption is an indirect factor for migration and a driver of forced displacement… Corruption has countless manifestations. Prominent examples include bribery, embezzlement, misuse of public funds, nepotism, influence peddling, extortion and misuse of public money of citizens. And we must not forget that migration and corruption influence each other, because it is exactly corruption that gives form to migration. Daily headache – we are somehow used to the following complaints: “We are tired of the existing system”, “we are treated unfairly”, “nothing works”, “only this country has this”, etc…
Yes, thats how it is! The fact remains that people have always emigrated and will continue to emigrate in the future, looking for better living conditions. If once in Yugoslavia migration meant exactly that – “better living conditions”, migration was and remained current, especially in those strata of social life that were at the lowest level of development, with rather low income and education level. Thus, European, Australian, and American factories were filled with new labor, mostly from rural and poorer areas of Yugoslavia. But wasn’t that the case with the middle class or the wealthiest of the population?! Today we live in a time when exactly this group of people is subject to migration. What happened in the meantime that led to such a situation?
I emphasize that I am not counting the elites here. They have their own special immigration system, especially when their bargains and corrupt deals are going to come out as leftovers in public and find themselves in front of some kind of moral court, because the existing one is obviously seriously cerebrally stagnant. And it is precisely in such cases that the so-called transnational connections are activated. In translation, the mysterious appearance of duplicate, triplicate or unknown passports and documents, which should initiate transnational mobility or express the dislocation of their wealth, making it inaccessible, even preparing for an exit of quickly out of the country in case of criminal prosecution. But we also witness cases where some of the elites benefit from corruption and send their families and money abroad as protection against changes in wealth.
Therefore today the situation is more than dramatic! 40 percent of young people are motivated to leave the country precisely because of corruption with all its consequences… And from last year’s research on this topic, perhaps half of this percentage has already left Macedonia. After all, it seems that we have consciously brought ourselves into a situation where our country will be emptied… The reality is harsh and will promote the future labor force imported from distant India, Pakistan or Nepal, which among them others will enrich the cultural diversity in our already great country. I will be a little ironic, we are planning to open the Constitution anyway, so it is not bad to start counting them in the constitutive people’s section?! Each with their own pain and star!
There is not a day that we do not wake up to a new corruption scandal or witness a continuation, a new connection from the previous one, which seems even more terrible than we expected. An anemic, dead system that, like a body, is waiting to disintegrate by itself… We are buried in the ground, but day by day we sink even deeper, until there is no place for our shame to come out. What is certain is certain! If nothing else, we will wait for the publication of the Agreement with “Bechtel and Enka”, as a small victory won by the moral court! But, yes, we had no clue about a corruption scandal here?! Therefore, when one gets into bed with the Government, one must expect the diseases it spreads – what would authorities from the US, of the caliber of Ron Paul, say.
And speaking of Americans, a little paraphrase from Vonnegut, at the end, as part of the mastery of The Landless Man: Well, no matter how corrupt and greedy and heartless our governments, our corporations, our media and our institutions are religious and charitable, music will still be a wonderful and sublime thing!