We should all go to psyhcologists

Originally I wanted to write about Webster Groves - the lovely suburb where we are living. But some recent devastating events in Hungary got me so upset that I decided to postpone my perfect and shiny Webster Groves description and instead write about my thoughts - how I see my country from roughly 8000 km distance, in the light of living in the USA.

I will share two stories with you. Both are Hungarian, but otherwise completely unrelated.

The first story

The first story is a public one, the very one that upset me. In a nutshell: in my beloved country, which used to be a young and blossoming democracy, the biggest opposition newspaper was shut down, overnight. As it is usually the case with stunning acts of dictatorships, the sad news was trending internationally over the weekend in an amazing speed (in the Bloomberg, the Telegraph, for example).

And this is just the tip of the iceberg, and underneath, in the water, in the deep and rotten, there are tons of thousands of similar and even uglier stories - the wrongdoings of the oligarchic system of the current Hungarian elite.  

Well, of course, the Hungarian society has already had 6 years of this madness, during which the vast majority just calmly endured, most people are kind of trained now for these events. (For those of you who don't know: it started with a new government announcing a new constitution in 2010 and I cannot tell you a corner of life that stayed intact since.) I already listed  how far we got during the reign of this government from a developed and satisfied country where people like to live. My people doesn't stand against these events, it seems to me that nothing is horrible or big enough to shake up the vast majority of  Hungarians.

Losing a newspaper has horrific consequences to a society - if you have seen this movie, or heard about this story, you know why. And it is also not that easy to redo the harm. Founding a newspaper comes with high costs and funding (or monetizing) investigative journalism is becoming a more and more challenging problem.  

When the story broke for us, in Saturday morning, we got devastated, hovering aimlessly around in our little apartment. I know that many of my friends had the very same feelings - hopelessness and anger and great pain.  We lost an important fortress that resisted this political madness and offered a little island of normality - where newspapers are not the newsletters of the government.

This was the first story.

The second story

The second story has nothing to do with the first one. It is a family story, happened this year in Hungary, but that is basically the only connection between them. 

This story is about a woman's life - let's call her Mary. Mary's parents met when Jack, the future father, was still at university. Both young and deeply in love, Mary's mother got pregnant. The couple got married, Jack dropped out, as the responsibility to provide money and food with a child and wife suddenly fall on him. This was in the mid '70-s in Hungary, life wasn't that easy in those years. 

The newly-weds lived together with Jack's mother. She wasn't an easy character, to say politely. She hated and despised her new daughter-in-law and not-yet-born granddaughter from the first moment, and with great bitterness. She did everything in her power to make everyone's life miserable. And she was quite successful - Mary's mother and father felt enormous shame for what they did, for having a baby.

The parents didn't think they made a good trade - to let a university degree go as an exchange for the fruit of their love, for their daughter. They weren't happy, proud parents - trusting that the difficulties will ease over time. 

Instead, they somehow subconsciously blamed their daughter for every bad turn of their life, starting with the lost university degree. The shame never went away, but get implanted to the childhood of Mary, drop by drop, deeply to her soul. Years later the family had a second child - Annabell.

Time had passed, the girls were growing up. 

And Mary was a little strange. She was smart, gifted in some area of life, yet she never in her life dated men (or women). There were no secret kissing at the early teenage years, no joy of discovering her own sexuality, no boyfriends in any stage in her life. She already got a degree and a stable job, the family still doubted if she ever has touched another human being (or herself, for that matter) in life. She was keen on being and staying 'clean'. 

Years passed again, and rumors evolved in the larger family that there was something seriously wrong with Mary. She became a maniac, avoiding contact with other family members, friends, neighbors or colleagues. She stopped working. She became extremely paranoid and suspicious - especially with doctors, whom she obviously would have needed. Yet no one took her to a visit.

And then, Jack suddenly died. By that time, Jack's mother didn't enrich the life of her loved ones on this Earth, she had passed away a half a year prior. The girls inherited a big but run-down family house in the countryside. Usually, it is extremely painful to sell such a house in the Hungarian countryside. Indeed, the estate was on sale for years, so the family felt very lucky when a potential buyer showed up, willing to pay a decent money for the house.

By that time, no one was really in touch with Mary, as she was terrified of her own family and refused to make contacts with them. But Mary was necessary for selling the house, as it was her property in 50%, so Annabell and other family members had to have her consent for the selling. They made an effort to get in touch with her.

Mary's phone was disconnected, and neighbors stated that she had long moved from her apartment, and no one moved in since. Having no idea where to start searching for her, the family decided to broke in the empty apartment - maybe it offers some clues regarding Mary's whereabouts. 

Indeed it offered, but something greatly different: Mary's dead body. By the time people found her, she was dead since an estimated six months. 

This was the second story.

Consequences

This is a horror story. A nightmare of an existence. No one wants to die this way: locked to your head, to your own madness, abandoned of family or friends, being dead and half rotten for a six months before anyone opens the door to you.

I have goosebumps when I think of Mary's life - in how many levels and layers was it wrong and broken. I could spend hours with analyzing who's responsibility is this sad end. I could claim Mary, herself - after all, it was her life, her responsibility, why didn't she seek for any help to balance out her childhood. I could claim all her family members - because maybe Mary couldn't reach out for help herself by the time she accepted the fact that she needed it. I could blame the parents - about not being healthy and sound enough, not being a barrier between the grandmother's bitterness and the child, but making the situation worse. (I have a couple of more idea, but I won't write them all -  this is not the point of sharing this story.)

The reason I shared this story with you today is that I think this is a completely average family story in Hungary.  And this has a devastating consequence to the public life of my country.

Just in this week, I heard the described story, another horrific one ended with suicide, and I didn't even search for stories! And if you think that poverty might be a factor in the making of these tragedies - well, in both cases we talk about rather middle-class families. Every single family has at least one similar story from the last 50-100 years.

I could tell you endless of these  family stories. I could easily fill complete nights by telling them - as if a Halloween-edition Scheherezade - and you would feel by dawn that you are living in a different universe. In a Maison of Madness. Stories would be about rapes and horrible abuses where justice never comes, holocaust traumas ended in buried identities, lost statuses in the upheavals of social changes where piece never reaches. I would tell you a countless number of suicidal cases, alcoholism and other forms of self-destruction - things being a result of the world where Good rarely defeats Evil. Where Evil rules most of the time. (Don't believe me - check out this statistics, and take a closer look at the Central European region - this is also a regional thing, not just Hungary affected.)

The problem is not the stories itself - although the region had such twentieth century that made survival an advanced skill of Central Europeans. The real obstacle is that after the traumas, after such a century, no psychological work has been done in most cases. No any sort of recovery or healing. No transitioning back from surviving to fully live again.

In Mary's story, some sort of trauma goes through three generation - killing the member of the third one. No one stood up against this effect through the course of a half of a century. And I know, it is not that easy to find help. But most people don't even realize how deeply they are dragged by their fears, moved by their bad spirits. Did you have Jewish ancestors? You have work to be done. Did you have abuse in the family? Suicides? Alcoholics? You have work to be done. Was there any trauma happening to any of your family members in the last 3 generation? You have an enormous amount of work to be done! You have to dissolve these stories and the traumas behind them, make them harmless to you and your kids. Otherwise, you will just pass it away, as your parents did to you. 

So I am asking you, my fellow citizens, why do we exactly expect a healthier public life in Hungary, a more resilient one, one that stands for itself (e.g. in case a national newspaper is shut down) if most of us are completely unable to do so in a private setting?  Why do we never connect these two spheres of life - the private and the public?

You know what Elanor Roosevelt is famous for saying - 'No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.' Well, I think this is perfectly true for the public life as well. We could resist this government. We have the tools, the knowledge, the committed people. We have enough harm done to have all right on Earth to resist. Yet the resistance is just not happening on a large enough scale.

It is not happening, because most of our citizens value and care themselves as much as this government values and cares them - close to zero. They are the prisoners of their own self. The hell outside is just the reflection of many people's world of inside.

So, if you want to serve your country, just do us a favor and go to a psychologist. Get you part of the work done. Only free souls can be brave enough to win Hungary back to us.

Photos: 
The first photo depicts the last printed headlines of the shut shutdown newspaper. The source is mno.hu.

The second one is a painting from a Hungarian painter, János Gulácsi, famous for being schizophrenic and made paintings about his inner world. My suspicion is that Mary had something schizophrenic-alike, I couldn't think of a better way how to illustrate the world of people living in such condition. 
This painting is called Arte, Vita, Natura. This was one of his last painting before he died. The dominant, door-like split in the middle of the painting is the entrance of his grave, and you see him walking in. Yes, seriously. Today, 12th October marks the author's birthday, another reason why to choose one of his paintings to illustrate today's post.  
The source of the painting is commons.wikimedia.org.

The third one is an OECD bar chart regarding suicidal rates based on data from 2011. The source is qz.com.

The second story:
For protecting their privacy, I changed the name of the characters and some minor circumstances in the second story.