Prologue

FROM SERIOUS CONCERNS TO PERSISTENT HOPE
Orientation

We are slowly leaving another winter behind, maybe even more filled with events than we would like it. There is everything there: little joys and old bitterness, heavy concerns and persistent hope. We were enchanted by holidays, Tourism Fair, FEST, golden athletes, some creators and their works, a little boy from Valјevo who turned in to his teacher the money found on the road, people of Kralјevo who showed to everybody how to win as gentlemen and knights. We were mostly worried about demographers, meteorologists, experts in people’s health, destroyers of the educational system, statisticians, commercial and economic analysts. We were ashamed because of the tabloids, the ”elite” that stepped out from the national responsibility, pretentious charlatans in public offices, egotistic officers of the protectorate who are wearing their leashes as jewelry. Because of the silent majority ridden by the noisy minority. because of indifferent participants in this grand farce.
And us? We have joined the rummaging in the dump and describing the rot? Or pretended that we couldn’t see any of this? No, of course not. We have searched for what opens up our road again, restores the lost orientation, establishes the saving comparisons. For what clears the blurred ideas and ”teaches the dark how to glow”.
That is why we visited writer Slobodan Despot in Sion and football player Nemanja Matić in London. That is why we included a reminder of the fifth anniversary of the departure of Momo Kapor, went to the exhibition of Jovan Bijelić and listened to the epic of Stojan Hajduk. That is why we leafed through the murals of Zrenjanin like a book and walked around the Royal park in Kovilјača.
But you knew this already, without us saying it.
Is the orientation to the West only a linguistic gibberish? As progressing backwards?