Broken windows

So we're back and received the first "good news". Our house in Tartu, my grandfather's house we've been restoring to make a small literary café has been vandalized. Again. Someone had broken the windows. Thrown a stone? A champagne bottle? Don't know but it makes me sad. Sad to live in Estonia, be an Estonian. Free speech is not appreciated here. And if you speak out, you better face the consequences. Bitter consequences, that is.

So now it is the windows. A while ago it was the mailbox. Someone, ahem, how shall i put it... dropped his or her fecal into it. I don't know which of our articles caused this kind of outrage but i'm pretty sure it had something to do with our blog. I've lost interest in blogging in estonian because most comments that we receive are cruel, defamatory and just plain stupid. I feel that i become smaller and dimmer just by reading them. And so i've decided to stop writing in estonian. Well, maybe not entirely because i do feel guilty in front of our fans who do not understand english but here i have to follow my heart's advice. I just can not be proud of being an estonian now.

I don't even know if i want to live in our country where you get punished for speaking your mind. I'd much rather live in Texas. I love Dallas. I love that "don't mess"-attitude. Then again, i love Barcelona too, for its dirty bohemian air. My friends in Barcelona have asked me how i can live in Estonia, they themselves fleed a loooong time ago. Lived a couple of years in Lisbon and then moved on to Barcelona because to their mind even Lisbon was not free enough. But i don't understand how you can live in Estonia, they shrugged. My lil' patriotic heart protested then that oh no, we are just fine, people will change, we'll change them. Well, we tried hard but the sad, tragic truth is that you can not change people who do not want to change. A slave might not be particularly happy at the sight of the first rays of sun on his first day of freedom. Or even his first years of freedom. There's resentment. American blacks have been free for almost a half of a century now but they still carry resentment, they still bear a grudge. Take reverend Jeremiah Wright for instance who kind of wrecked Barack Obama's campaign, or so they say. He has no love for America. When i listened to the old reverend, i kind of felt for him. I felt that there was a former slave who'd waited for his moment to become a master so impatiently and now that he had the chance to actually become one, through his friend Obama, he overreacted and almost ruined it for the blacks to become masters in a country where they had once been slaves.

We, estonians, can identify with American black people because we too were virtual slaves in our own country when we had to join the USSR. We had it worse though because we had been masters of that country and that added to the shame, a shame that has become unbearable, now that we're free and able to contemplate it. We blame the russians although these ordinary russian working men and women who we treat like second-class-citizens had nothing to do with the occupation. They didn't kill our grandparents. Maybe their grandparents did kill our grandparents, but i think that the times when you were right to blame father's sins on his son are well and truly over. A great part of my father's family was slaughtered by the soviets during the 40s, my father's cousin was thrown into the fire while still alive, my father's uncle's family was shot because the uncle had given bad vodka to the russian soldiers, my grandfather was put on an animal wagon and taken half way to Siberia from where he had the luck to escape and come back home, my father was imprisoned for 8 years in Vorkuta for hiding a resistance fighter in his apartement. Men of mother's kin were mobilized into soviet army and their graves are unknown... There's more but I don't carry any hatred for the russians. My father told me that when he was in a prison camp, his best friends were the russians. Even he did not hate the russians. He taught me that there are animals among all nations.

There are an awful lot of animals among estonians too. The Bronzenight reignited our hatred for the russians because they reacted violently against our government's decision to remove the Bronzesoldier. In America i met some estonians who'd fleed there from the soviets when they were little kids and they said good, serves them right. Our president Toomas-Hendrik Ilves is one of these estonians. He does not understand Estonian history because he looks at it with a perspective of a runaway slave. He's just like a little boy who's managed to avoid the beating and now shakes a fist at the beater. I'll show you!!

Estonians who fleed the soviets during the 40s did not become free. They became runaway slaves. They had it better than, say, for example, my father who had to try hard to get himself accepted into Tartu University when he came back from Vorkuta, he was almost 30 then, but they, the slaves that had run, lost their identity and connection to The Story. Their book was burned, their thread was cut. They can never consider a russian a friend because they have never had any russian friends. So they had it better, somehow, because they lived in a free world but they could not shake a slave out of them. Just like American blacks have not been able to shake slavery out of them. President Ilves said to Suomen Kuvalehti that he does not want to talk of the russians on the day of our independence. Why? Can't russians as part of our nation be included into the celebrations? His words sound like a slave saying that he does not want to talk of his former master on the day of his great escape.

I think that you become truly free only when you'll be able let go of the categories slave-master, only when you understand that you don't have to flee in order to be free because freedom is innate. You only become a slave if you let someone enslave you, if you submit yourself to the will of others. I think it would be good for us, estonians, to have one russian as a friend. For Toomas-Hendrik Ilves i think it's crucial to have a russian friend. Dimitri Klenski, anyone? Maybe you could even teach him some russian?!

The windows are still broken and i think that there'll be more broken windows. We can mend them but for how long?