NEW ‘WONDERFUL’ POLAND
GRZEGORZ GÓRNY
A few months ago, during a meeting of the Seym, a proxy of a committee ‘Stop pedophilia’ Mariusz Dzierżawski started reading an instruction from a parliamentary pulpit, how to masturbate. His speech was stopped by the marshal of the Seym at that time, Ewa Kopacz. She noted that there were young people in the aula who can feel offended by the content. In response she heard that it was a fragment of a textbook for sexual education, approved by the Ministry of National Education for Polish schools.
Recently, ‘parents’ have come to a parish priest in Ursynów, in order to have their child baptized. During fulfilling formalities it turned out that the baby did not have a father, but three mothers. One of them is a genetic mother (gave her ovum), the second one – was a biological mother (carried a fetus in her uterus), and the third one – a social mother (she adopted and brings up the child). A father is unknown because a semen came from a sperm bank.
Welcome to a new ‘wonderful’ world! All this is not happening in a far-distanced future nor on a literary imagination. These are events whose action takes place here and now, in today’s Poland. Some social-manners processes, devastating public and family life, are started without any publicity, developed with a method of accomplished facts and with omitting a public discussion. Unexpectedly we fall asleep in one reality and wake up in another one. Suddenly it turns out that what has been recently considered as abnormal, is thought to be normal today.
Is it possible to indicate a particular moment when it happened, as well as, is it possible to state precisely that the assassination on the World Trade Centre took place on 11 September 2001? Well, it isn’t, because we are dealing with not a single event, but with a long-term process.
However, these are not phenomena on which we do not have any influence. The direction in which the civilization is going, depends on the sum of our particular life choices. They also include political decisions, as well as activity in the public space. Czesław Miłosz was right when in his ‘Moral Treaty’ he wrote: ‘You are not so passive/ And even if you were like a meadow stone/ A avalanche changes its course/ No matter on what stones it is going’.
So, there is nothing like historical determinism because we have a free will. There is not such an adamant historical necessity, which would order people to accept crazy ideologies. Therefore, indifference of the Christians and their turning away from public issues is, indeed, permission for giving up a field to an opponent. For, as Edmund Burke said: ‘The triumph of the evil will exist only when good people do nothing’.
AA
„Niedziela” 03/2015