At the beginning of December, I was in Cetinje and gave two lectures to high school students. When the seminar ended, they gave me a roll of Njegu cheese and a jar of local honey. A student who stood out for his seriousness solemnly presented me with a gift with choice words that were interrupted by applause and laughter. Then I thought, it's a shame that there hasn't been good news from Cetinje for a long time.
At lunch in the City Tavern, I watched the young people sitting, how they treated each other, and I was proud and filled with hope. They were happy that the local government offered them a house at the New Year's Bazaar. They will sell decorative bombs, trinkets for children, scented candles made by their teacher. And the money, they emphasized, should be collected for charitable purposes. I tried to point out to them that charity actions are complicated to organize, that their school is the right place to invest that money, but the girls and boys were determined to help others.
When I heard the news that all the New Year's festivities in Cetinje were canceled, I remembered those children and their stand, their love for life that flares up around New Year's when the city organizes something. Now they are in their homes, perhaps mourning a relative, perhaps watching a neighbor in black remove the Christmas tree from the yard. There is no new year, only a new crime. The monstrous face of the armed devil who took this land under his control so long ago that we no longer remember when.
The second mass murder in Cetinje in two and a half years with a terrible total of 24 dead. A city that is exhaling economically, whose high school students can't wait to escape to study, a city that has loaded itself with so much historical burden began to crack under the pressure. Just like two years ago, a middle-aged man attacked women, children, friends and relatives.
These are days of mourning and one should be careful, but something must be said. The wounded city needs to be protected from tabloids and sharp condemnations. The gentleness that I felt so many times in Cetinje has to be fought for itself. But how?
Maybe the time has come for Cetinje to stop saving Montenegro and start saving itself. Everything is irreversible and everything passes, including the roles assigned to us by history. Cetinje is a historical unique, but also an ordinary city, with ordinary people who suffer. It is a city that is guided by a great obligation, but forgets its small debts. Those debts apparently pile up in bad places, hurt and burst at regular intervals. Murders, fears and massacres are not Cetinje. Although they are not his essence and that is the first thing that should be said, because I hear more and more that Cetinje is going crazy, that there is no happiness or love in the city, while people are waiting for new deaths.
Similar general settings are just an echo of the wretched media channels from which we are fed with sensations. That's why it should be repeated, Cetinje is an unusual city with ordinary problems. It is a small community that history has honored with the fate of watching its own decline. Nothing happens there that cannot be explained by local arguments that boil down to a combination of economic and social ruin. Neither is Cetinje the valley of the gods, nor is it the city of killers, although those two mythological points are tried to be imposed in public speech with an overturned saw.
In Montenegro, there is a lack of a sober voice of sociological research, so social networks shape our public thought through chatter about mentality and higher powers. We hurt each other with the pathological glorification of egos and disgusting points. The pleasure of dopamine in the days of death crystallizes the beastly attention that leads to overindulgence. Political hyenas use the corota as a flag and the flag as a rag. Mass murderers, by mistake or on purpose, become carriers of some big message, supposed social keys for understanding the social context. But that is simply not true - a man who kills people at a bar table, and then decides to kill children, cannot carry a message for the people of Cetinje to understand. He chose a way too dark and wordless for us to take as part of the social contract. Such a murderer has chosen a path that does not help us, it only frightens us terribly. To think lightly of that crime is to give in to the necrophilic impulse and to ignore life, which must be explained by life.
Nothing happens in Cetinje that doesn't happen elsewhere in Montenegro, and I would dare to say in the world. We live in a callous time of evil impulses that seek their share in blood. Why Cetinje again, is certainly a topic for thought. Psychologists will not tell us whether the first crime planted the seeds of the second, we will read about it on Twitter. There are few who say that the Capital is not separate and special, but a general and faithful picture of the state in which such blockages of consciousness are possible. That society is sick from above, from representative aggression, theft and the systemic collapse of the individual, who for decades has been seen as a number and a nameless resource. That ammunition has been distributed for too long for higher goals for low motives. That the patriarchal dogma of violence has shaped the generations, hammered away the little freedom we understood from reading. That our families are half-crazy, brotherhoods are organized, tribes are politicized, while everything that has a price is sold stone by stone.
Society changes in days of peace and joy, not in days of cries and mourning. Emergency situations work well for us, but we need to look for answers in regular life. This society has lost everything except compassion for the victims, so let there be sympathy, let it be built from sadness, if it has to. Montenegro is better than it looks in the distorted mirrors that we point at each other. With our behavior and shouting, we produce anger that settles for a long time. So I'm going to say something terrible - use the days of mourning to feel sorry for yourself and help others. We are all in Cetinje and no one can escape it. It is happening now and the responsibility is great. The hills surrounded us. There are no wise words, only the heart, quiet, meek, for all of us.
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