One should not look for excuses for one's country

I don't usually write about social and political stuff because I try to keep this as much a reflection of what I am doing professionally as possible. However, these days I cannot help noticing how deranged this country of ours is. It may be that I have developed a form of oversensitivity to real circumstances what with spending most of my waking hours surfing the Net to read about cool stuff, but somehow thing are amiss with Romania and I don' understand why.

If I was a comedian I would take solace in realizing that stupidity has an in-built comic element if you are not personally touched. Witness these...

1. Sector 1 City Hall is trying to be inclusive and allowing flat dwellers to vote for the color of the paint that is to be used on their building. Large billboards show pics of what the building will look like with the two coats of paint and you are invited to vote. The problem is the paint is the same color. Brown. Light brown or dark brown. Virtually undifferentiated. And furthermore, eventually the building gets painted in....green.
I am hoping this is a result of democracy and of people choosing neither light nor dark brown. And I am looking at the comic part of it.

2. The city reeks because of the uncollected garbage. And this morning I found what they came up with to fix this. No, it's not collecting the garbage: it's spraying the sidewalks with fragrance water. So now everything smells like dishwater..... and uncollected garbage.

3. Street cleaners: their job description includes the necessity of keeping things CLEAN. But they are picked from among the most unclean people possible (of course because no clean person would do the job) and they are not trained so if you watch them sweep, it's painful to see how much dirt they actually leave behind.

4. We are in deep deep financial crisis. So deep, jobbing websites only search for top management because all other positions are being made redundant. And yet the only thing the government worries about is elections and how to rig them. They do so publicly. They do so with such disregard to what we care about that it makes me sick.

I am tired of the stupidity and lack of decency in this country of ours. I am tired and disappointed and I would leave tomorrow given the chance, with one purpose only: to drag my parents out of here too.