29 March 2024, Friday, 15:51
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Speak for Yourself, Lida

109
Speak for Yourself, Lida
Iryna Khalip

Mind the closing doors!

I read the latest interview with Lidzia Yermoshyna and almost choked on borshch. No, there was nothing unexpected written there. It was just an ordinary Yermoshyna's mess, which she has been playing on repeat for a quarter of a century. I suspect that in the ninety-sixth some dodgy professional wrote these theses to her, and since that time no word has been changed. However, she remembers some tricky new expressions like "social network".

Not habitual false statements about "elections" made me choke. Speaking about upcoming resignation next year, Yermoshyna got questions about her plans when she retired. She said she would act like the rest - to wait when her life ends. I want to offer her to speak for yourself.

After retirement, all normal people who live in harmony with their conscience, wait for anything, but not for the end of life. They just experience its new phase with new plans that can finally come true. To visit children living abroad without thinking about work or the cancelled fright because of snowy weather and following truancy. To take care of their grandchildren. To let children have a vacation. To go fishing with university friends they missed a chance to meet with for half a century because they used to be busy at work. To meet with school female friends and laugh all night saying "Oh, girls, do you remember? ..." recalling not quite decent nicknames invented for the evil maths teacher. To dance or learn Chinese. To go to the countryside and set up a farm. Or to ruin all the seedbeds on the summer cottage yard, sow the lawn and lie on the grass with a stack of books one has wanted to read for years. To master computer games and play Call of Duty all night long. Do whatever one wants. Even one has much health or pension, everyone has plans: to walk ten kilometres, bake a cake, make peace with an old friend.

Yermoshyna has no plans. Her life ends as soon as she retires. That's the price she'll pay. For years of falsification, lies, hiding crime of others and the organization of her criminal gangs. She can't travel because there's nowhere to go and no one to bear her a company. No one will come to visit her to taste borshch. She will become an empty place even for those who share the same table with her today in the government. She won't even be able to walk around the city, because she's been lying on TV for too long. Everyone knows how she looks, which means that every passer-by is a potential enemy. It will be great if one just passes by. But what if one spits on her? It's humiliating and awful. It's better to stay in the cottage and wait for death. Because there's nothing else to wait for.

It will happen to others. There's a clap and you're dead. No, everything's fine with breathing and blood circulation. With huge houses in Drazdy, dollars in off-shore banks and barrels in the basement, purchased property somewhere in the Emirates. But there are no other plans but to wait for death. For all these decades, they sit quietly in their cellars and stroke barrels of dollars knowing that if you are obedient you have a chance to return after being kicked out by the left leg of the ruler. To return to the factory, film studio, "house", KGB, executive committee. Anywhere. However, the whole system of coordinates razes to the ground together with Lukashenka. Yermoshyna is the first to see this. She has managed to tell by eye the boiling point, the level of hatred, the number of the scale of ballot rigging and the subsequent magnitude of the future protest. She realized that there was no chance.

The rest are about to see this all but, having shut their eyes tightly, play on repeat: "please, not today." After all, their situation is even worse. Their children and grandchildren, who now use the family name and kinship with pleasure, will prefer to change them tomorrow. Today, if you have relatives among KGB leadership or high-ranking officials, all the doors are open to you. When the coordinate system collapses, the doors will open in an unpredictable way. It will be easier to forget your daddy-executer than to waste your life trying to clean up a black dog.

However, officials still have a small chance. Little time left for them to make a choice. Some of them still have options, unlike Yermoshyna. But one should make a decision quickly. Mind the closing doors!

Iryna Khalip, especially for Charter97.org

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