Different

I browsed the collection of a daily newspaper in which I used to publish daily articles on the issues of the day, as they appeared to us in the first years after 1990, and I was not proud of myself at all. Back then, I was.

THE WRITER FROM THE 3^rd PAGE
I browsed the collection of a daily newspaper in which I used to publish daily articles on the issues of the day, as they appeared to us in the first years after 1990, and I was not proud of myself at all. Back then, I was.

The people I used to talk about have been long forgotten, and those who are still public were massively damaged. Most articles were concerning the President. Even the best articles have a short life. Usually a day. I made a simple ratio: during the time spent on the articles about Iliescu I could have done a lot of better things. I earned some money, but I lost years of my life. Most people give years of their life on their earnings, but there are a lot more better options in the press, no matter how appealing the job you're doing appears to be.

The thousands of articles spread all these years in those daily newspapers must have had an effect, but if the effect was positive or negative, large or small, towards the truth or against it, I will never know for sure. The unpleasant part is that the situations I was writing about have been forgotten and even if I remember parts of them, they do not impress me at all. In time, happenings that, in the first years after the revelation – the name that a friend of mine gave to the events in December 1989 - seemed cardinal, with fatal importance, have no dimension at all and don’t mean anything to the general public of the media. I wanted to go up, but the reality pulled me down. There are many other respectable journalists in my situation. Some built selective anthologies with their best articles, but anthologies quickly lost the public’s interest as well. The cause is one hundred percent Romanian: our problems have been continental only incidentally. The problems have not allowed us to be the philosophers of the newspapers and die with the consolation thought that we served the people with ideas valid no matter the situation. In other countries, there are journalists with European platform, and some of them write to the entire world, towards all four cardinal points. There aren’t editors to write articles that could be read, with a maximum of participation in England, France, Germany and Bangladesh not even at the publications with an elitist public.

Once I calmed down at the thought that I have been writing for years in a regional and mean Bucharestian style, I tried to select from the weekly media some articles written by colleagues of mine that one could translate and spread throughout the world. For the world to know not only what we think about us, but how the major concerns of the planet affect us as well. I found some ideas for that, but not entire articles to be translated. We have to stop and think about the meaning of this and start doing things somewhat differently.