Three years later, or how the "smart and beautiful" became just the "beautiful"

On June 13th, 3 years ago, I was at my boring job, in my boring office, waiting for another boring workday to end, when...
…scrolling through my Facebook feed regularly and without any particular expectations for anything exciting, I realized that I already had a casus belli (a cause for war) with the then government of Plamen Oresharski, which I didn't like anyway ( because they were communists, penniless, and I was taught from a young age that BSP = evil, of course ). And what a cause I had.

It's not every day that one of the country's publicly known mafias is appointed as the future greatest...anti-mafia. "They're done for," I thought, but it wasn't until I went to the square and saw about 20,000 electrified people that I realized that what was happening would have a much bigger impact than the replacement of yet another prime minister or the dismantling of the left, which is already dying of intellectual and physical old age.

Yes. The revolution was in the air. But the crowd was not frowning, it was not hungry, it was…happy. With a beer in hand, a bicycle for transportation, a dog for company…people arranged meetings with old friends, greeted forgotten faces, tried to stand out with color. This was not a classic protest. It was more like a rally. “ The smart and the beautiful,” I thought, long before someone immortalized on air what we all thought about ourselves at that moment. And yes…the difference with the winter protests a few months earlier was colossal. Instead of a raging crowd with social demands in the style of “I won’t pay my bills,” we had positive, well-mannered, neat, working people who had every right to be dissatisfied with what was happening, at least because they were paying for it out of their own pockets.

Reading this far, you're probably wondering what's different about this article. I'm sure there have been dozens of posts in the last few days with the same introduction, memories, photographs, etc. I'll try to give a slightly different reading and assessment of what happened, focusing on the people at the protest themselves.

It is needless to say in what way the protest failed – it is clear that Oresharski's government did not go away because of DANSWithMe.

The Big Losers

What was irreversibly changed by this event was the psyche and self-perception of many of its participants. The energy unleashed then allowed me to observe live and on a large scale everything described in Gustave Le Bon's book "Psychology of Crowds", which I had read only a few years earlier during my student years. The protest broke up families, created new ones, gave birth to interest groups, parties, individuals with messianic complexes, conspiracy theories, myths and many other bizarre things.

Who had heard of Assen Genov before this moment? I admit, I didn't. Ivo Bozhkov is already a municipal councilor; Emil Georgiev - chairman of a party, Justine Thoms - a member of its management board; Antoaneta Tsoneva is a person from the Protest Network, along with Lyubena Ninova and 40 other people; Ivet Dobromirova was a PR person for the government; Radan Kanev was (is) in power, etc. This is a sample of the people who managed to capitalize on their personal assets from protesting, in which, of course, there is nothing reprehensible or immoral.

I'm more interested in those others, the romantics, the people who every day, regardless of their duties, the weather outside and everything else... protested for more than 400 days. These are the people who found meaning in their lives when they protest. This is the person who will bring the flag, the one who will take the drum and the megaphone, the aunt who will treat them to a feast from home, the girl who will change her hair color 400 times in 400 days. These people had roles, they mattered in the whole machine called protest. They weren't just the zeros you add at the end. They were the active ones at the front.

I'm sure that the overthrow of Oresharski from power did not bring joy to these people. Thus, they lost their meaning for themselves. If there is nothing to protest about, who will praise you for bringing the flag, who will compliment your new hairstyle, who will praise you for the feast?!

These are the big losers. This chemical and hormonal rush that the crowd can bring you, in combination with the boiling June breeding season, has created an addiction in these people (in our country), similar to that of chemical substances, extreme sports, gambling. They have become addicted to mass demonstrations. This is my reading of the Protest Network, which has existed for three years now. People who want to keep alive the emotion of that time when they were significant, people knew them, televisions filmed them, they had a purpose in life. It is not the public interest (whatever that means), not the good of our country (whatever that means) that are the leading factors in decision-making among these people, but the simple selfish desire to be important, significant again, to taste that hormonal and chemical rush of 2013 again. Which again is nothing reprehensible or immoral, but it is important to be aware of it when listening/reading/deciding whether and when to trust these people. I'm not saying don't do it, I'm saying keep it in mind...

When ideas don't matter

The other, more worrying thing that the protest managed to achieve was the shattering of people's ideological compass. I observed the same phenomenon in Skopje less than a month ago. The current "Color Revolution" there is an absolute copy of the DANS WithMe birthday party - a big protest at the beginning and fewer and fewer and the same people later; Gosho always wears the slingshot, Pesho always wears the paints, Elena always has a new haircut, Aunt Mara wears burek; the kibitsi drink beer and tell jokes. I talked to people while they were taking the same walk through the center that we did three years ago and asked them if they were aware of the example of Bulgaria, how it all ended here, etc.

What I was able to understand from them is that they are fully aware that the party alternative to the current rulers are exactly the same mafias and swindlers. They are aware that removing them from power will lead to exactly the same principle of governance and work and it is unlikely that their lives will become better. And they didn't care...

“It doesn’t matter if it’s the socialists, if it’s the VMRO, if it’s the Albanians…what I want is justice and for the bad guys to go to jail,” a 25-year-old girl at the protest told me. Sounds familiar, right?

What the June protests achieved with political speech was the birth of the new narrative – the mafia vs. the people. We as a society must lynch the bad guys and it doesn’t matter whether the left, the right, the nationalists or Yolo Denev will do this job. The important thing is that it happens. Even if we don’t live better, even if those we put in power take out about 20 times more loans than the one we protested against, even if we put a left-wing person as the leader of a right-wing alliance, with questionable managerial, intellectual and other qualities (yes, I’m talking about Radan Kanev)… that’s not important.

Regardless of who will be next, how bad they will be, whether they will put us in a debt spiral, how much they will raise insurance premiums, how much they will hinder business… the important thing is that there is retribution. And even if they do me harm, I will persevere. I will persevere, because I have protested for 400 days so that these people can come to power and deliver justice. If I spit on them now, it means that I spit on those 400 days in which I was doing something meaningful… and then did it make sense at all?!
And it is precisely with this logical loop that the fight against the bad guys became the electoral trigger for the smart and beautiful...and that is a problem.

It's a problem because, when, due to emotion (from protesting, having an important role in something, the desire to stand out with color, to deal with the bad guys, to bring justice) you lose your reason (to realize that the people you are about to put in power will do you even greater harm than the previous ones), from being smart and handsome, you are left with only the latter...

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