This is 2010 Romania. I call it the Human Grinder. To most foreigners, Romania is a land of few, but blurry ideas: Dracula, Nadia, poor children, and probably the crappiest roads in all of Europe.
The best roads in the country are those the Romans built 2000 years ago. Yet on those roads, we drive the new successful cars of Dacia Pitești, while the chosen few ride in style, in cars that Angela Merkel and Jay Kay would hesitate to pay cash for.
The best thing to be in Romania is a foreign tourist. You get to see man-made Hell, plus a few great and perhaps touching moments, and then you get to leave and go back to a life where work pays the bills, buys you your dream car, sends the kids to college, and gets you healthcare when you need it.
When traveling to Romania, remember: nothing is as it seems.
Sad But True
It sounds blunt but this state is too primitive to even begin to care about discrimination and try to fight it. Most of us are a bunch of starved animals, ready to tear one another apart for a piece of food. Someone up there must find that very useful, since every four or five years, elections are won with food packages distributed to the voters ... It is a whole other world and another perspective, which a Western European will refute and deny until the end.
The golden dream for most young people is to be given a chance to live somewhere else. But a “Get out of Hell Free” card never comes free for a Romanian. It makes me think who will be left, if most of us leave and those who cannot, die?
As a woman and a citizen of Romania, I have witnessed and experienced discrimination in many and surprising forms. I majored in Political Science and am quite familiar with concepts such as effective governing, minorities, empowerment... and discrimination. However, the most important thing I have learnt in the University was that most of these concepts do not fit us, because here everything is rotten to the core and covered in lies to make up the necessary appearances. We have European laws ... but most people here invest their creativity in going around them.
Discrimination Under the Magnifying Glass
I won’t write about what discrimination means, because others have done it way better than I ever could. I will write about what discrimination feels like. The victim of discrimination is the Girl with the Matches from Andersen’s tale. It feels like humiliation and powerlessness, because someone else decides your fate and there is nothing you can do to change that. And all this happens while you see that the ones who make the laws keep the privileges, nay, the rights to themselves. FA Hayek and John Rawls would freak out if they saw us now ...
Who Discriminates Whom?
Our country experiences various types of discrimination grafted onto a bigger, more widespread type: the income—and status-based kind. Here, money makes everything better, clears any name and criminal record and discrimination is no longer felt if you surround yourself with money. If you are dark skinned, illiterate and live on state support, you are called a Gypsy and condemned to live in extreme poverty and without access to a dignified, decent life. If you are dark-skinned and illiterate, but are financing elections from blood money, you are a worthy, honest citizen and get to live better than a German or British Doctor who spends his or her life to find a cure for cancer.
Two Examples
Last year, a forum user wrote to me asking what to do because her boss had fired her upon learning she was pregnant. Of course, there is a law banning business owners from doing that, but they have big law-firms, while the workers have babies to worry for ... I directed her to someone who specializes in labor law, but she refused... probably knowing that our justice system will take until her baby is in secondary school to recognize her right to keep her job.
