The blackout in Podgorica was hard on many people, but it brought back memories of good days for me. The family gathers around the bar and plays raffle. Faces get halos, wax pours, and the voices of the household crackle as if from a record. Everything is gentle and quiet, one would say that some kind of disaster is brewing. And tell me honestly, what does a boy have to wish for but a disaster, to turn it to his advantage and be among the heroes.
But you will... Just as you shout "Zikvina" and think you are the winner, electricity comes and everything loses its meaning, including your victory. The television is turned on, we return to washing the dishes, home from nature and society, diary supplement.
To this day I hear that interruption. I remember better how the silence ends than the darkness, the refrigerator turns on first, all the possible lights that we somehow managed to turn on before the electricity went out shine. The housemates survey the apartment again, as if checking whether everything is in its place. In the end, in the bedroom, the kamacrown alarm clock blinks with zeros, you wind it up for class and lie down in the dark knowing that the electricity has come on and that they are watching TV in the living room.
I protested in vain and tried to convince the others to continue with the raffle, that it can be played even when there is electricity, that you don't have to immediately go back to the routine, that was simply out of the question. The power outage was a necessity that brought the players together. That parliamentary dimension of electric shocks and restrictions has not been sufficiently sociologically researched. Did many families enjoy themselves in such a way, and then, as soon as the chandeliers were lit, gave up their games, because life is not a raffle but a scheduled sequence of moves.
Last Sunday, the Ipsos agency published the data that Montenegrin children spend an average of eight hours a day in front of various screens. The news was not important enough to be widely talked about. If the children were hooked on some kind of Russian server, there would be panic, but as it is, we still don't even know where they're going, we just know that they spend a full working shift hanging on the screen of their phone, computer or television. And that doesn't turn on anyone's light for now, nor is it seen as a particular social problem. The metropolitan punishes husbandmen, the prime minister is looking for oil, everything revolves around those few big topics and eternal truths.
Now I can only see how wonderful it was when the TV was the devil's box in the center of the living room. The box around which the grandfather and grandson were bleeding, around which marriages broke. Famous were the days of family fights over the remote control. Overnight, all of this sank into the heresy of wireless, no two brothers watching television together anymore, but each staring at his own piece of the screen.
And once upon a time we all knew how to draw ourselves in front of the TV as a real family, we hung out nicely next to one screen, and had a healthy social life, nobody was missing anything.
As disturbing as it is to realize that parents have raised their hands and allow their children eight hours of screen time, I still have to point out some objective advantages of such radical educational cuts.
Children now get the right to choose and probably won't grow up with the assembly and varosharis, but will look for their own devil, so who picks up what.
More than ever, parents have time to devote themselves to news from the country and the world - when you read an interesting article about, for example, kavak clan, there is no need to worry about your child anymore. You know he's happy with his iPad, and watching some satanic American garbage.
The best thing is that you don't have to argue with your heir and prevent him from playing video games, because today's kids don't play, they watch others play on YouTube and pass the levels for them.
But that's not all. Seventy percent of children did not go to the theater last year, 85 percent did not visit a museum, and two thirds did not go to a concert.
I look at the Ipsos research and wonder if it is not time to return the restrictions. To seduce clumsy Sundays without a screen, or to raise the price of electricity. Is it even democratic and cool to think in that direction and expect someone to like it?
Maybe ban Viber on Fridays and Saturdays, allow Facebook on even days for boys, and on odd days for girls. Something has to be tried. I'm not insinuating that we should go to museums, I'm not crazy, but maybe sometimes we should play something old-fashioned like bingo.
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