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Lessons from Bosnia — Part 10
Community and Human-to-Human Relationships
This is probably one of the most important topics I could write about. Everything I wrote about so far, in all the 9 lessons from Bosnia has value because of this topic. After all, it is all about the society and humans, right?
Have you ever heard of the saying:
A fish stinks from the head, but it’s cleaned from the tail?
The saying implies that when leaders ‘go off’, the only way to fix the society is from the ‘bottom’, meaning, ordinary people. However, what if the people are not ‘rational’ enough to do what needs to be done? How do social problem effect ordinary humans, and what kind of relationships will they have? What if the environment created, the environment in which they live, has shaken their rational thinking?
It wouldn’t be fair to blame everything on the current situation. The fact of life is that we inherit all sorts of traumas, and if there is nothing to teach us otherwise, we just get worse. This can be said for any society.
By nature, Bosnians are stubborn, brave, and proud. In the past, they’ve always been modest. They’ve always been good people — I am proud to admit that we’ve always been on the right side of history. We’ve never attacked anyone. We’ve never been indifferent to the problems of others. Heck, even today, when Bosnians are greedier than they’ve ever been, beggars in Bosnia can make a decent living from the change that people give them.
Historically, I believe it would be fair to say that Bosnians have been discriminated against for well over a century, maybe even longer. During the Ottoman Empire it was okay, but not like we were independent or particularly respected.
That rule ended with Ottomans just handing us over to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Anyone involved with Palestine now should know that Ottomans had a habit of doing that back then. Situation is unclear, but I’m not here to make sense of that. For now, many Bosnians felt abandoned by this power that brought some sort of order to the region. Many Bosnians left Bosnia. In fact, one of the most famous poems written by a Catholic, Aleksa Santic, in Mostar is called ‘Stay Here’. Aleksa talks about the courage of Bosnians, mostly…
