It’s no secret that our social circle is quite varied. There are relatives, old childhood friends, parents’ friends, neighbors, classmates, university groupmates…
Over time, that variety thins out through our own choices — we start spending more time with people we’ve chosen for ourselves, like friends, and less with those circumstance threw our way, like coworkers or classmates.
Like attracts like, it accumulates and multiplies. It’s genuinely hard to imagine me, someone who gets around by bicycle, having Bentley-driving gentlemen among my close companions.
In the end, a kind of clustering by interests takes hold — we root for the same team, enjoy similar music and pastimes, shop at the same stores. We vote for the same candidates.
And this is where I have to note an observation I’m making for the second time in my life.
For the second time in my memory, my country has elected a president who inspires nothing but secondhand embarrassment. After a twice-unconvicted “proffessor,” our all-wise people chose a clown and a buffoon, whose dubious career and social achievements amount to not-at-all-funny mugging on the stages of various countries and the desecration of his own. A man who shines in a scripted, pre-recorded promotional video and cannot string together a simple sentence on his own, even in his native Russian, in public.
And then the faces of my acquaintances begin to float before my eyes — from that forgotten, old social circle that has gradually peeled away and drifted off, yet not disappeared entirely, merely retreating to the distance of a social media post or a phone call.
And it becomes all the clearer how right I was, each time I put distance between myself and each of them, for separate reasons — otherwise I would not be who I am today. Otherwise I would still carry a piece of each of them inside me: someone who doesn’t silence their phone at the theater, who tosses a cigarette butt at their feet, who cuts through traffic on the shoulder, who laughs loudly at crude toilet humor, who fills my Facebook feed with banal quotes, who parks on a pedestrian crossing…
And it so happens, in a curious coincidence, that not one of those green “voters” I know personally has achieved anything in their life. They have no material wealth beyond what they inherited, and have not earned enough in their lives to buy even some beat-up old Lanos.
They have no intellectual wealth — no books written, no articles published, no discoveries or inventions.
They have no spiritual wealth — no moral qualities for which even their own children might respect them or wish to have them as mentors.
And finally, they have no artistic wealth either — no melodies composed, no paintings painted, they can’t even carry a tune.
The one consolation — among that same forgotten, peeled-away circle of old acquaintances — small stars of understanding flicker. Few and far between, but bright.