29 March 2024, Friday, 11:03
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We Are Adults Now

24
We Are Adults Now

Today we celebrate our 28 years.

Once upon a day there were happy people with national flags on the streets of Minsk; it used to be a holiday. Independence Day, the country's birthday, the day of high hopes. Yes, for about a year Belarus was formally considered Soviet, and the constitutional status of the Declaration of national sovereignty was given in August of 1991. But the independent state appeared on July 27, 1990.

Then its birthday was ignored and shifted to July, it looked like name day celebrated in an orphanage. Gradually, this day was crossed out of calendars, headlines, and our memory, after all, it has to keep so much information that this date has become insignificant. But today we are twenty eight.

Sometimes I apply the human age to events happening in the country. And when my foreign colleagues wondered why we let it happen, I explained: we are still small, we are wearing diapers, we are a young country, and a child always has bumps and bruises while learning, and it's a norm. The child explores the world. Years passed by. Colleagues from countries of the same age were surprised once again heard about a young country, which can still make mistakes. Their moving into adulthood was decent and calm, they managed to enter adulthood as equals. But I kept telling about children's mistakes we had a right to.

Now I understand that we have decently faced all stages of moving into adulthood. We were standing in front of the Supreme Council being ready to rescue the Constitution unless the adult speaker of the Parliament asked us to disperse. We were obedient and did it (we can be excused, we had no experience).

Then when we were 16 years old - it was 2006 - and got our first passport. Do you remember tents on the Square? Do you remember restless protests of many days, crowds of people with warm clothes and thermos bottles rushing to handle them into hands of guys in the tent camp? By the way, many of those guys were of the same age as the country. And instead of passports they got their first arrests, paddy wagons. Do you remember this March 25? A long column of protesters, concussion grenades, gas, batons and shields. If you receive you passport under such a musical accompaniment, it means that you're a good person.

According to all world laws, a person of 21 years old is an adult, and in 2011 we became adults. It looked like the dark ages, the high noon of the inquisition, Torquemada tribunals, and shut mouthes with fear and threats. And against this backdrop, there was a young fearless country marching to prisons with dignity, collect parcels for prisoners, holds pickets and applauses on the streets. Some equals in age of our independence who received their passports five years before becoming adults had terms in prison as a gift. We passed this exam, didn't we?

Now we celebrate our twenty eight years. Psychologists say that this is the age to give a new meaning to values. It is true adulthood. The call-up age expired last year and now we are almost dry behind the ears, we are too wise to become soldiers. During the Soviet years, people of 28 years old ended with Komsomol, adults went to the Party, rebels turned into dissidents, and the major part of the population lived an ordinary life with all its hardships. I don't want us to have such a future, although the current collective farm inquisition does its best for us to live the same.

But no we have no right to say that "we are to blame, we are small, we have a room for a mistake". No, guys, we have not. Our pack of mistakes has run dry. We are adults now.

Iryna Khalip, especially for Charter97.org

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