I was walking and I caught up with this guy. He was young, my age maximum. He was handicapped, dragging his legs behind while he was using a ton of effort with a couple of crutches to move. He wasn’t a beggar, he was dressed OK and listening to something on his mp3 player. Close to him, I thought to myself: if I do this, will it remind it to him that he can’t walk right, that he can’t use his legs while others can? And I felt ashamed. ASHAMED. I don’t have fonts big enough to write as big as I felt ashamed.
I felt ashamed for me. I felt ashamed for him. I felt ashamed because I had a normal life and didn’t seem to be able to enjoy it anymore. I felt ashamed that he probably had a shitty handicapped pension which was about to get smaller because of the crisis, though it wasn’t his fault. I felt ashamed because I didn’t appreciate the fact that I could run arround and kick people in the head if I wanted to. I felt ashamed because I sometimes felt ashamed for being Romanian.
I felt ashamed for living in a so-called civilisation which chooses the oil in Arabia over the starving children in Africa. I felt ashamed because we spend more on weapons than on hospitals. I felt ashamed that we lose our sanity over shit instead of being able to enjoy what really matters – the beautiful things in our lives. I felt ashamed for having more than that man without doing anything to deserve it.
But I got ahead of him. I was in a hurry. I had to go to the bank and pay the monthly fee for my loan – you know, those things we get ourselves into only to complain about it later. It was a loan for my car. You know, that thing in which you move without using your legs. If I were to ask that man what would he pay so he could use his legs, I bet his answer would be ANYTHING. Or maybe EVERYTHING. If you ask me how much I pay so I don’t have to use my legs, my answer would be 74 Euros a month.
Inside Romania 