Shame

In an unphantomable exercise of democracy (unphantomable because DEMOCRACY does not happen in romania very often), last night an un-elected parliament (un-elected because when we vote for parliament we vote only for the political parties who can put any person in parliament) voted to suspend an elected president (for whom i voted btw). While I feel that it is good to have this as a display of democracy, i can't help to feel the injustice of it all. I feel neglected as a voter. It does not help that one of the members of parliament said and i quote "Mr. [enter president's name] has been threatening us with the electorate. Are you afraid of the electorate? What is the electorate?" [stupid f*k] So yeah...

I have finished reading "cat's cradle" and loved it all the way. What i loved most, besides it being exhilaratingly funny and TRUE, is the following idea: the people of San Lorenzo (island country in the middle of the Pacific) are very poor, their life expectancy being around 35 years. However, they are very very happy. Why? Because of a very important pact that their leaders (the political and the religious one) have done: you see, the political leader threw the religious leader and the religion he was preaching in disgrace, and any follower found practicing that religion is bound to suffer a gruesome death. The thing is, everybody (including the political leader) is a follower, and the religious leader is never ever caught, even though search parties are supposedly going out for him. So you see, the people are poor, and hungry, and full of diseases, but they are happy, because their lives are filled with excitement, because they feel that whatever it is they are doing is important (by the fact that it's illegal even though it's noble). There's more to it than what i just said, but i am not very good at reviews or story-telling for that matter. I put some quotes below.

"She hated people who talked too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind."

"This here is a re-search laboratory. Re-search means look again, don't it? Means that they're looking for something they found once and it got away somehow, and now they got to re-search for it?" (now THIS is personal)

"Hazel's obsession with hoosiers around the world was a textbook example of a false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon. Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company [...] and any other nation, anytime, anywhere."

"The hand that stocks the drug stores rules the world. Let us start our Republic with a chain of drug stores, a chain of grocery stores, a chain of gas chambers, and a national game. After that, we can write our Constitution."

"I do no say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays."

"If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself."