They say that the English stick to tradition and that what they had in the past is mostly present today. It may have changed, more or less, but it's still there.
We are traditionally non-traditional. Only at first glance it seems that we are sticking to tradition, but it is actually "in our blood" to stifle, destroy, and even obliterate it. Perhaps it is true that we as a society are not even destined to keep what is worth lasting for us, and that we are also inclined to inherit what we should leave behind. Perhaps it would have been better if, in addition to being a society by definition, we learned along the way to be a community as well. But that word is somehow foreign to us, although it is obvious that it is ours. We know it, it hasn't been there since yesterday, but we have no idea why someone once had the need to abstract an adverb together to the level of a noun.
But who is "We". When I talk about us, therefore, I am not referring to a certain state or even national space, but I am talking about a mental environment, which, it is true, can be determined to some extent in time and space, but which above all represents routines, habits and experiences shared by generations of people adults on the same or similar psychosocial patterns. What significantly disturbs the relative durability of those patterns, and thus our psychosocial balance, is that famous discontinuity that paradoxically represents regularity in our history. Because, when we leave the old, we burn everything behind us and, like aggressive chemotherapy, we possibly leave healthy cells and tissues only for the organism to survive. Let's remember the glorious tradition, only when the present disgusts us so much that we can't look at it with our eyes, and then, considering that after everything there is nothing left of tradition - at least nothing authentic and practical, we consume only its weeds and rot packed in the irresistible charm of myths and legends.
Early psychosocial moments, i.e. those fine routines of my generation were shaped in the atmosphere of the first half of the "eighties", when weekly broadcasts of matches of the first and second federal football leagues were heard on the radio. Sutjeska, Partizan, Hajduk, Velež, Sloboda, Radnički, Olimpija, Željezničar, Vardar, Vojvodina, Čelik... were the clubs we loved, not only because they were good, but also because they were ours. We loved Zvezdan and Bora Cvetković, goalkeepers Janjuš, Zajec, Slišković, Šestić, Sušić, because those names sounded "our" to us, and being a sports patriot and a local patriot is logical, I would say quite acceptable and certainly harmless thing. Today, our kids support Barcelona and Liverpool. It's strange to me, but I'm not defending! I'm just saying that with the end of Yugoslavia and that large familiar space, which had a significant "melting pot" potential in a broader cultural sense, we actually reined in some ordinary wonderful traditions and routines.
Thus, we leveled the tradition, and thus the routine, habit or culture of watching good children's and educational TV programs. Our cinemas suffered not only from the "blitzkrieg" of the global technological trend, which was not in their favor, but also from domestic cultural traitors. We go to concerts only if they are organized as a free accompanying party to political, parapolitical or New Year's rallies.
Those fine life routines, which give meaning to the "rut" of life, have disappeared. Those prosaic symbols of urban settlements, embodied in large hotel gardens and city pubs that smell like a mixture of spilled coke, beer and wine, have disappeared with them. There they "lie" transformed into privatization figurative (and literal) black holes.
The tradition of progressive and socially responsible urbanism retreated before the lightning rush of insidious vengeful provincialism. Beneath the layers of fragile ceramic tiles and hypererosive behaton, with which they consciously pave the exteriors in order to pave them again in a year or two, the "silent" granite foundations of the former civilization peek out from time to time like fingers through bushy socks.
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In my small hometown, which looks like any other small town, there was a wonderful pastry shop (that's what we called pastry shops). Sterile clean and airy, with green chairs. When you enter it, you feel the harmony of smells - champita, boza, lemonade and burek, which together form some new indescribable and above all pleasant smell. She disappeared. And it was supposed to become a tradition.
Recently, when I left for Sarajevo, I was driven by a "wild" taxi driver. Adaptable man. He knows how to deal with people and customs officers. No other transport to SA, ba. And Transservis from Bjelopolje and Centrotrans from Sarajevo used to drive. Only the road to Sarajevo mostly remained "faithful" to tradition (it took me right back to the "eighties"), so on the way back these roads in Serbia and Montenegro seemed to me like Germany.
I bought my mother "one hundred years old" Užice, that is, "homemade" acid for a mini-valve in the "Frizerpromet" cooperative store in Belgrade, down when you turn from the Theater to France, then to George Washington across the street and a little to the right. Over the years, the mother worked less and less, so the need for acid became rarer. One day, I plan to pick up one for dyed hair, one for normal hair, thinking if there will be that "alum" in the shift who regrets the bag, when alas! There is no plot. Privatized'. Now there is another action. No wainscoting, and only 'Italian goods. An Italian swear word comes to mind.
"Nero's syndrome" (cf. a. - if it doesn't exist, here I suggested it) of the destruction and construction of a new world, the obstacle, out of pure cheif, has loomed over our destiny - the generation that remembers "the before", and which for the most part of life spent in "this now". Processes have been replaced by revolutions, evolutions by revolutions, reason and logic by nihilism and relativizations of everything imaginable and unimaginable. They talked about demolishing old ideologies and paradigms, but actually it was about demolishing human lives and the idea of human community with all its habits, routines and traditions; those small ordinary, not those epic traditions, which make up life and which we can "feel"; traditions of predictability, on which the reliability of planning things in life depends. Knowing what is the expected consequence of an action, act or cause is a value worthy of tradition.
Ten and Ten would be a great title for some anticipated reissue of Pearl Jam's debut with the addition of ten new songs conceived and produced in the old fashion, but it is actually a memory of the departure time of a train that no longer exists, from a train station that no longer exists. I'm used to things being in a certain place and I like to have them "waiting" for me when I return there after a while. I imagine, like in the movie Back to the Future, if I get out of the time machine there, "the one at ten past ten" will surely be waiting for me. But it won't, and not because of the time machine, because it might be built, but the railway station in Belgrade is no longer where it was and where it should have remained. It lasted from 1884 and it can be comfortably said that it made Belgrade, directing the development of its public transport and other public facilities and institutions in the function of the availability of easier satisfaction of the needs of people who come to this capital on business. Many who have seen the world say that the view from the main entrance of Štajga (that's how Belgraders have called it since its inception) was one of the most spectacular "entrances to the city". Exactly on July 1, 2018, and after 134 years of operation, they closed it permanently. A few years later, they "fixed" its facade. And there she is lying like a made-up corpse in a sandwich between Nemanja's back and the walls of Belgrade on the water. And the clock above the door of what used to be her main entrance is still ticking, even though it should have stopped at 10:10.
The author is a lawyer
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