While we wait for the end above the septic tank, we should be ashamed because we didn't try!

By: Rasim BELKO

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Tears, as dark as the gloom in the belly of the earth they enter with hope of emerging, and shame blacker than what they bring out of that earth. The shame and tears of miners marked the week behind us. And miners should be the last to feel shame, and especially to cry. Miners, who from time immemorial have honestly earned their bread with seven crusts, should not be ashamed.

Nor should healthcare workers be ashamed, who in the past year have given their all, to the last drop of sweat, to curb the consequences of the pandemic as much as possible and protect citizens from the vicious virus.

On the streets, ashamed are also police officers, construction workers, students, citizens. And everyone is ashamed, yet they should be the last to feel shame.

Bosnia and Herzegovina is far too deep in socio-economic chaos. The pandemic did not bring this chaos; it only unmasked it.

And lo and behold, all those who work and earn honestly, who unquestioningly carry out tasks, meet and exceed norms, are the ones who feel shame.

Only the shameless in power have no shame. In state, entity, cantonal, municipal, and District authorities. For them, shame is an unknown in the equation of inequality.

They do not earn their salaries. They are power, authority, the controllers of our lives. They are human gods from the wrong side of civilizational truth. They bring unrest, fear, poverty, and hunger.

Welcome to Bosnia and Herzegovina, this is 2021 before the new era.

While our feudal lords in three cities on three rivers entertain themselves with stories and fabricated problems, all of us together, the serfs of three leaders, are busy swimming out of the septic tank into which our lords have pushed us up to our necks.

As long as the false republic, the real entity with a majority Serb population, is the greatest exalted thing worth fighting for, the Serb people will continue to teeter on the brink of sinking to the bottom of the septic tank. And the feudal lord of those Serb people, Milorad Dodik, will continue to entertain them that the RS will one day become a Greater Serbian Byzantium, and they, whose heads stick out of the septic stench, will continue to laugh and cheer with shouts, unaware of the end, when they lose strength and can no longer stay afloat.

At the same time, in the fiefdom of Sarajevo's lord Bakir Izetbegović, while everyone thinks about how to destroy the lord from Vrbas, Milorad Dodik, they are unaware that they themselves are sinking toward suffocation. The Sarajevo fiefdom inevitably drags Zenica, Tuzla, Bihać, and everything in between down with it. And it is hard to come to one's senses in the pit of stench, hard to see clearly, ever harder to see the path to salvation.

On the other side of Ivan, down in the Neretva valley, in his hacienda cooled by the Herzegovinian heat, feudal lord Dragan Čović is plotting how to create his own Greater Croatian Byzantium, while the Croatian people, together with Aluminij, melt in the pit of their own byproducts and gases.

And so, years pass, and our feudal lords together devise plans on how to deceive one another. As we follow them unquestioningly, we sink deeper and deeper.

Therefore, we should not be ashamed that only our heads still stick out of the septic tank. We should not be ashamed of poverty and hunger. We should not be ashamed that our children flee abroad so they too do not end up here with us. We should be ashamed because we tried nothing. Because we blindly followed promises knowing they were lies. We should be ashamed because we are waiting for the end.

And the end is certain while we wait for it with our heads above the abyss of the septic tank and gasp, “It's fine as long as it doesn't burst!”