WRITTEN ON THIS, THE 37TH ANNIVERSARY OF POLAND'S TRANSITION TO DEMOCRACY
So many people today get wound up by things that do not remotely affect their day-to-day lives. Migration is a good example. People living in picturesque English villages that have seen an influx of three foreign workers say they feel “swamped”. Young people with no direct connection to the Middle East drifting into anti-Semitism because of Gaza. The issues may be real enough, but the emotional weight attached to it is often wildly disproportionate to its actual impact on the individual’s actual reality.
This is not to say that migration, war, terrorism or national identity are trivial matters. Of course they're are not! But proportion matters. Russia is an existential threat to Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians and Poles in a way that Israel is not an existential threat to citizens of South London. Islamic terror is an existential threat across parts of Africa and the Middle East in a way that it is not to people living in rural Poland.
The closer a threat is, the more materially it constrains daily life, the more rational it is for politics to be organised around it. If you like in Kyiv right now, the prospect of being killed by missiles or drones sent at you by a bloodthirsty madman is very, very real.
National politics should, at root, be about two things: the economy and security, internal and external. Citizens have a right to feel safe. They also have a right to expect that their hard work, thrift and enterprise should be rewarded by growing prosperity. When governments fail on these fundamentals, anger is justified. When anger is transferred instead onto distant symbolic causes over which neither the citizen nor, often, their government has much practical control, politics becomes emotionally satisfying but civically useless.
Sitting here in rural Poland, I see a country on the rise. That rise is not accidental. Macroeconomics are not just a matter of government policy; they're also the aggregate result of habits, incentives and behaviours of millions of people, earning and spending money. If people are entrepreneurial, hard-working and forward-looking, the economy moves in one direction. If too many people become comfortable sitting back on generous welfare benefits, it moves in another.
There is a simple test. If there is something you can do about a situation you dislike, do it. If there is nothing you can do, then moaning is pointless. And 'doing something' does not mean shitposting on social media. It means acting in the real world.
Don’t like massive increases in traffic, density and suburban overdevelopment? Move out to the countryside. That's what I did. Don’t like the direction of your country? Build something, employ someone, stand for office, volunteer, organise, write, teach, invest, persuade. Face to face, not online. [Ditching Twitter/X in November 2024 led to an instant improvement in my mental wellbeing.] Politics should not be a theatre in which people pin their frustration onto remote causes. It should be the practical art of improving the conditions of life where one actually stands. Delivering solutions rather than winning arguments.
This time last year:
Farewell, beloved grapefruit
This time two years ago:
Sixty-Six and Two-Thirds
This three years ago:
Marching for Openness and Normality
[We have it. Let's not get complacent.]
40th anniversary of the Osieck railway accident
This time six years ago:
Moonrise, Nowa Wola
4 June - a date remembered for...?
This time 11 years ago:
Corpus Christi, rural Mazovia
This time 12 years ago:
25th anniversary of Poland's transition
This time 13 years ago:
Poland's infrastructure progress
This time 15 years ago:
Wetlands in late-spring
This time 16 years ago:
Jeziorki's flood of floods: Puławska and Pozytywki
Jeziorki's flood of floods: Sarabandy and Karczunkowska
Jeziorki's flood of floods: Trombity and Kórnicka
This time 17 years ago:
Another time, another place
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