Saving Our Lives, We Are Saving The Country

Strike today = People's Quarantine.

A month ago, I nearly lost my mother. God only knows what our family went through when she was hospitalized with coronavirus with 80 percent lung damage and rapidly falling blood oxygen. It was very hard and scary.

In two months, three employees of our editorial office alone lost their loved ones to covid in Belarus: one journalist lost a mother, another - a father, and another colleague of mine lost her husband.

A real war is going on in Belarus. On the direct orders of the criminal Lukashenka, a mass murder of people is taking place in the country. The refusal of quarantine, the actual call not to wear masks, the lack of mass vaccination - leads to the daily death of hundreds of people. In two autumn months we have already lost thousands of lives, and if nothing is done, the plague will continue - tens of thousands of people may die, including our relatives and friends, among whom there may be us.

When I talk about the strike / people's quarantine since November 1, I think first of all about people, about their lives. I know that the leader of the Belarusian Workers' Association Siarhei Dyleuski, who urges Belarusians today not to go to work and stay at home, also thinks about this first of all, because his father also went through the intensive care unit, having become ill with covid. But what they think in some headquarters and organizations when they try to pull the blanket over themselves and pout their lips with resentment, why the workers did not ask them for permission to initiate, I do not know. But definitely not about people.

"There are no generals and commanders-in-chief in this war,” said Siarhei Dyleuski. "Every day of delay today is worth hundreds of lives."

We all need to stay home to save ourselves and our families. To achieve basic observance of our rights and respect for our work. To help our heroic political prisoners, who today are in much greater danger in prisons than we are at large. To finally show this gang that has seized power its proper place.

Nobody calls on Belarusians in today's situation to hold meetings or to hold occupation strikes at enterprises. Just stay at home under any pretext: don't go to work, don't go to universities, don't let your children go to schools and kindergartens.

In fact, you are not dependent on the bosses, but the bosses are dependent on you. Without you there will be no process, they can not fire or replace everyone. You are the force. In this life, you owe only one person - yourself. And the uniqueness of today's situation is that by saving yourself, you will save the country.

Natallia Radzina, Editor-in-Chief, Charter97.org