Flowers and fairy lights: why some things do not sound so awful, as they are when we are talking or writing about them
By admiring and praising life, which is not perfect and sometimes not even bearable, but the one and only they have, people get the strength to stay resilient
The other day one man told me his success story. He had his first “business” when he was 10 and earned enough to buy a house by the time he was 17. I listened to him speaking of what he did and how he did that like he was from a different planet, though he just grew up in 70ies in LA. Things he was talking about were absolutely impossible at the place, where I grew up: in soviet and postsoviet Ukraine.
I shared some of those reflections with a friend of mine, who, too, grew up in Austria, in the Western world, and told him a bit of my reality when I was 10 years old. Like, while I watched people, using mobile phones and computers in movies and TV shows, to make a phone call myself, say, to ask what was the homework for tomorrow, I needed to go to the payphone by the next block and wait in a queue. My mother was not able to afford the tokens, but I had plenty of outdated soviet coins, that did a job, only I had to be careful people didn’t see I was using them, because they might have thought the payphone could break because of that. And the broken payphone meant a whole neighborhood with no connection for an undefined time. After dark (like, after 3 pm in winter) my mom wouldn’t let me go to call – it was not safe. The payphone was kinda in the dark corner. Once I saw there bleeding man, bitten up, unconscious. The other time there were two guys and a girl, they were holding her and she was crying and screaming “let me go”. Both times I didn’t go all the way to the corner, just turned back and ran home after what I'd seen. I don’t even remember if I told my mother what I saw, as my stepfather was never at home and my mom, small, subtle, could’ve done nothing anyway. I went home and watched Josh Baskin living in that wonderful house as a child and using a computer and later, as Big, even, if I'm not mistaken, the mobile phone. I thought that life, that world simply did not exist and was just something for the movies, while someone I know now at the same time created a business mowing lawns by subscription. In Ukraine, there was literally no single person who was able to pay someone for mowing their lawns.
As I spoke of those and some other things from my childhood, my friend unexpectedly told me: “But you are speaking of those awful things kind of with love”. And I had to admit that probably yes, I did. I had only one childhood, so I had to love at least something about it. The childhood memories I happened to have were a bit desperate, but I did not have anything to replace them with.
There is a reason why the person is sleeping in the bathtub. The narrow place between the other room, a narrow space without windows is considered the safest place in an apartment. So sometimes people or entire families spend their nights in bathrooms, avoiding the need to run to the bomb shelter every time the air raid alarm sirens sound.
And here we are, a couple of days later I read this stupid thing on Threads, that the power cutoffs look very cozy and beautiful on the Instagram accounts of Ukrainians. Like, we need more things like that to actually appreciate life. Seriously, more electricity outages because of missile strikes on energetic infrastructure?
I was so mad I had to put the phone away and then when I took it back Instagram would show me another thread to follow. Pity I did not take a screenshot or did not memorize the name of the person writing that.
There were already a couple of months of blackouts in winter 2022 with partly cutoffs of heating and water supply (water pumps are mostly electric). Back then people, too, posted cozy rooms, night window views, candles, and books, and spoke of how they gathered with friends, sang, and played music (like taking musical instruments and playing, not playing the recordings). They also said the coziness and uniting, warmed their hearts – and even this for a reason, for central (or not central) heating also needs electricity to work. The cutoffs were, of course, awful, dangerous and depressing. But honestly, you won’t get too far endlessly repeating how terrified, endangered, and depressed you are, so people looked for some angle or perspective that would give them a bit more hope and support.
In 2022 the shortage of electricity was caused by the attempt of russians to damage the transmission grid, which is comparatively easy to repair. But this time Russian terrorists are concentrating their missiles on Ukraine’s thermal and hydroelectric power plants, at the same time hitting the transmission system with kamikaze drones. This is way worse, so the new cutoffs came to Ukrainian reality in May and are to last for an indefinite period. DTEK, the largest energy company in Ukraine says they’ve lost about 86% of their generating capacity. Some important energy-generating objects were also targeted multiple times, being destructed, recovered, and destructed again.
What do people experience – no working elevators, no water, no air conditioning, no connection, no ability to work and study, no power to use tools and equipment to cook, manufacture, sew, you name it. I’m not even mentioning hospitals, research laboratories, transportation hubs, food and medicine warehouses, and other objects of critical infrastructure, as they call them. Those objects are always a priority to have electricity and it’s for them to use the cutoffs are happening to save energy, but the damaged system is a damaged system. Personally I can’t even imagine people with babies, ill or disabled people in situations of electricity cutoffs, but there are hundreds of thousands of them in Ukraine now.
But what do people post on social media? Cozy twilight streets, blurry and romantic in the absence of artificial light; candles and books; flowers and fairy lights that work from AA or even portable solar battery. They see the beauty in the disaster because they only have one life, which is happening now, and by admiring and praising it they gain some more resilience.
And oh, for a better world and focusing on real things we don’t need “more of the things like that”. We need justice for Ukraine, and to stop russia from destroying this world. That’s it.