Why National Pride Isn’t Measured in Minutes of Parade
Many have wondered why I chose not to utter those magical words at the start of this year, those polished wishes that flood every screen. The truth is, looking around, I felt that any "Happy New Year" would sound like cheap irony. You cannot wish happiness to a nation that is counting its slices of bread and watching its elderly shiver with cold in their homes, while the country’s resources—oil, gas, water—slip through the fingers of leaders who pull in opposite directions, like horses out of control.
I love this country and I respect its traditions, including our National Day, but I cannot ignore the massive chasm between us and the rest of the world. In America, their celebration is about the people, about backyard barbecues, and the freedom of every individual to enjoy themselves under the summer sun. In France or England, their day is a festival of community, where the state dances with the citizen. For us, national pride has been confiscated and shoved into a small box lasting barely an hour. We drag out old tanks under the sleet, parading scrap metal that belches smoke as if we’ve set fire to the future, and after forty-five minutes of military spectacle, it’s all over. The curtain falls, and the Romanian is left alone to face the bills and prices that crush them.
It is tragic that we have come to brag about some armed tractors while ten million of our brothers and sisters are scattered across the roads of Europe. People who left everything behind not because they didn't love their land, but because here, at home, the lowest job humiliates you, while abroad, your labor is paid with respect. Romania still breathes through the money sent back from Spain, Italy, or Germany, while we, the ones left here, beat our heads against the ballot box in hopes of a change that never comes.
We have reached a point where we choose our future through TikTok clips and club shows, ignoring the fact that politics has become a social engineering project directed from hidden drawers. We boast about our mountains and the sea, about giant buildings, but we don't know how to value our people. How can you smile when you see justice sitting at the table with traitors, when the police are used as a bogeyman for their own people, and when children have no access to a school that teaches them how to be free?
I have nothing against parades, but I wish Romania were more than a facade that lasts only until lunchtime. I wish we would stop being spectators to our own destruction. Until we stop being strangers in our own country and until we have the courage to say "enough" to those who sell us piece by piece, these wishes will remain nothing but background noise. We respect the past, but it is time we care about this present that freezes the teeth in our mouths.
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