Macedonia – Land of wonders

Zvonko Davidovic
Lawyer

We are one strange country, inhabited by an even stranger nation, a country where you will hardly be able to find logic and justification for certain actions and behavior of people, a country of strange standards, and an even more thoughtful way of thinking. Macedonia is a country of denial, debates, hiding and acting up, a country in which we have a problem for each solution, and have no solution for any of the problems. It is a country of pious people who do not believe in anything, a country of educators and literacy in which the majority is semi-literate, a country of nihilists and utopians. The rule of logic and the obvious does not live here, but the law of theorizing with a great deal of stupidity, without a final solution and a solution to the problem. The status quo is the preferred state, and each step forward is seen as a betrayal. Only here, in my country, time does not pass and it is not measured as everywhere on the planet, yet it stops and goes as needed, according to one’s desire or order, it is measured according to one’s needs, so we are very behind all others who stepped into the 21st century, while we still wander somewhere between the 18th and 19th centuries, and some people are still farther in the past, somewhere in the time of the phalanx.

We are one strange nation, witty and sly, that knows how to distort, spoil and cheat every regulation and solution at it sees fit at that particular moment, and then criticize everyone else for the same actions or solutions. In this country, commitments we are not fulfilled, yet are avoided, postponed or deliberately forgotten. We are vain, and there is no one in the world more intelligent and beautiful than us, everyone else is in our shadow, and the planet and the sky are only rotating for us and because of us, and the sun is just ours and shines only on us. We are always disadvantaged, robbed and unjustified, but never guilty and responsible. Only in Macedonia the past is written or deleted as needed, everything that has happened yesterday is not remembered and is quickly forgotten, the past is recreated and celebrated, and the future it is not even considered, nor discussed.

Authorities in my country are not smart people with proven results and acknowledgments, but people with thick police files and suspicious bank accounts. Always that strange and half-drunk “sage” sitting in front of the village grocery store is better at managing the Macedonian national team than the selector, and in front of Idadija, men are discussing international ties and solutions, but when something needs to be publicly stated, or support some kind of position or solution – everyone is silent and waiting for the debate to end, so that they can discuss it in private. Here in my country, we are all doctors and engineers, prime ministers and generals, selectors and governors at the same time. Everyone has a proposal and a solution at the restaurant table, but when the position needs to be loudly and publicly stated, everyone has amnesia or an urgent task. Only in our country, the diaspora knows who we are and what it’s like to live in Macedonia better than us, and what is more important – how we should live. Those living in America are Anti-NATO, anti-European are those in Brussels, while these diaspora-patriots send messages in English that we need to protect the Macedonian language and culture. The judiciary is dysfunctional for decades and serves only for ridicule, while the same law is understood and applied in three different ways by two different judges. The same law has a different meaning from one courtroom to the other, so one courtroom sentences to prison for stealing kebabs, and the other gives probation to a man who ran over a child with his car. There are trials round the clock, from dawn until midnight in the new building, while in the building next to it there is an outdated case with a prison sentence. One block away, on the river bay where the Eye Bridge is proudly lying above Vardar, the rumor of crime hardly reaches and it is even harder to hear, probably because of the good cardboard insulation and the glass dome. Couple of streets below, the rumor is even harder to hear, the one for judicial scams, because of the traffic noise and noisy tourists in front of Mother Teresa’s house, I suppose. Education is on an enviable level with textbooks that were written by the worst students, but the most viable in the tender. Only in our country, students come to school with a BMW, and the teacher arrives on a bicycle, and only here, students have more expensive phones that cost two teachers’ salaries. Only we have a bunch of universities and faculties, one per 10,000 inhabitants and in every major city, and still everyone is moving and studying in Skopje. There is no other city in the world in which it is strange that you are not from a small town, but rather born in it.

Only in our country, there are no bookstores in which you can buy books outside the capital, yet there are betting offices, and coefficients are the most read articles. In our country, it is safer to medically treat yourself at home because the hospital can kill you with a “medical” error, and there are no doctors because they moved abroad. We are a country with many countless things, a country in which the number of administration employees is unknown, as well as the number of population. The population census is performed only stores before New Year’s Eve. Macedonia is one strange country, in which everything is possible in an impossible way.