Twenty-five years of anything is a miracle. (Additionally to this high cost, someone would say.) Here, only the longevity of the government is considered natural and desirable. Everything else is suspicious - the more persistent and successful you are in what you do, the angrier and sharper the cabal is.
Kasaba's philosophy does not allow Montenegro to step forward, to change. During these quarter of a lifetime, Vijesti has been a continuous war against such a spirit, against such falsification of Montenegro. Against the comprehensive philosophy of the kasaba, whose first axiom reads - everyone outside (our) car is suspicious...
CG is not a place of long-term depression like Vijesta, here people get tired quickly, argue, blow things up... And then for decades they recount what happened and how, with each interpretation shifting the meaning according to the current winds, political, of course. After a few rounds of memory, they don't even trust themselves anymore.
As tenacious as it is, even today, that spiritual kasaba is a thing of the past, for all time. This is the most important meaning of doing in these quarter of a century.
Sometimes history and destiny predestined you for heavy weather, powerful events, those "interesting times" from the Chinese curse, and sometimes you have decades of idle driving or on top of the gas... You can't choose that.
I imagine a man or woman who left here twenty-five years ago. Wherever life took him, he had no time to deal with his homeland. And if such a person were to come to Montenegro today, how would all this look to him? What would you say first?
Sometimes, when I hear myself or Jov, Nela or Nina in the newsroom talking to young colleagues about "those times", and the beginnings of Vijesti, the people that those beginnings brought together, it dawns on me, if only for a moment, how great those two and a half decades really are. And how long ago it all was.
These 25 News are nothing compared to 30 DPS, you might say. But they are not the same worlds. 25 years of creativity and struggle when you turn it into party years of deception and self-deception turns out to be over 100. Minimum.
In 1997, Montenegro looked really different. One newspaper, one party, one leader (the one in Belgrade, the governor's triumvirate still functioned here), one people, one truth... You have accurately captured the spirit of that time in Professor Perović's book about the birth of the independent scene in Montenegro.
Vijesti, the first great school of otherness in Montenegro, emerged from the flame ignited by Monitor. It was something really new - suddenly everyone wanted to hear us...
There is no doubt that, however confused today's Montenegro may seem, it is far from that ideological and national "monolith", and the tiring, banal tribal idyll.
Today, the world is also different - language is being humiliated by cynical power mechanisms that could change human nature, but also destiny. I believe that the responsibility of the media in the next 25 years will primarily be to preserve trust in the Language. And it will be hellishly hard to achieve.
But 25 years is 25 years. Enough for serious insights, little for true despair. The path traveled is what decisively shaped us.
When we arrive at our Ithaca, only then comes the key realization: the path we have traveled is our Ithaca, not the dream island that drives us to wander.
It is a universal fate, what belongs to us as human beings: we will never reach Ithaca, but we will never leave it either...
In the great poem, Constantine Cavafy says: "She gave you a wonderful journey./Without her you wouldn't have set out on the journey./But she has nothing more to give you./And if you find her poor, know that she did not deceive you./Wise as you are. became even with so many experiences/you will already understand what Ithaca means".
It is unlikely that the next twenty-five years will be able to measure up to these first 25 in terms of dynamics and density. But, never say never...
Bonus video:
