Cities That Die on Their Knees

The factories, the enterprises have been closed, the military units have been destroyed, and people have no jobs. Everything crushes down; there is nothing to be built in the near future, the cities die on their knees. All the hopes, of any kind, have been shattered for a long time now. Living means surviving. The communism forced the industrialization of these cities, and the system then formed needed people to keep it working, and, apparently, the cities developed! There were a lot of people pleased with the fact that during the communist regime they a job and now they cry for that times in which Nicolae Ceausescu (the last president of the Socialist Republic of Romania) was in the lead of our country. What they don’t know is that he is responsible for most of the bad things happening in Romania today. The payment for all those years has been made everyday for the last 15 years, and the ones paying are the Romanians. It is a huge bill they have to pay, a bill representing the payment for 50 years of communism, for a system that has survived and still survives with the use of its consequences. Of course that in all these years that have since the Revolution in 1989 we had communist beliefs and communist behavior, but the worst thing we had to deal with has been the price that we had to pay I return for that system. This helped the communist regime survive, through its consequence, for another 15 years after its abolition in 1989.

On the other hand the parties in power after the Revolution have reacted in an absolute pompous manner to the evolvement of the economy, of the politics, of the way the people used to live. All this time there has never been a plan, a strategy to overcome the effects (the bill) of the communist regime.

The highest price that the Romania of our days has to pay is the one paid by the cities that die on their knees and by their citizens. I’m afraid that these cities that no longer have any industry, that don’t have anything at all, not even the possibility to develop as tourist attraction, will disappear in the following years. They will look a lot like the deserted cities from the movies we used to watch as children, from the times in which the communist regime was bringing to life monsters: "The New Cities"! The children used to draw them in lively colors and hang them to the walls, being very proud of their block of flats, neighborhood, or city! Who would’ve thought that one day they were to be dead, having a slow, silent death without anyone to see that.