There are always new things for me to take note of when I land in Sofia. En route from the airport to my house me and my parents are bound to have our customary conversation about all the new buildings on either side of the main road that takes us into the city. This time it was no different - there are new shopping malls (one of them being the biggest on the Balkans), five star hotels and glitzy office buildings. Sofia is even acquiring its own subway system, which, once it becomes extensive enough, will make the traffic a lot more manageable. In some ways the city is developing the kind of physical infrastructure requisite for any modern city.
But it is not the exterior that bothers me. When I was growing up it was the exterior that made our lives miserable - the empty shelves in the shops, the creaky buses, the potholes on the streets, the derelict buildings in the city center etc. Now the city and by extension we as a people have moved beyond that.
What bothers me now is the disentagrating internal moral fabric of our society. In the 1990's it paid off to be more pushy and to cut corners. It was survival of the fittest in the workplace, on the street and on the job. In post-transition Bulgaria 2010 all of that has been taken to a new level. It's perfectly okay to be corrupt and immoral. Some of the most corrupt figures in public life are constantly glorified in the media and have the audacity to freely promote themselves in the public space. It's accepted to be vulgar on TV. That is what gets you commercial success. Of course, the people that watch the vulgar shows on TV are the same people that are vulgar to each other on the street. The institutions that are supposed to provide moral guidance such as the Bulgarian Orthodox Church are themselves internally rotten. I could go on and on with more layers of that general societal malaise. Its symptoms are evident in many aspects of public life in Bulgaria - from our politics through our media to our relationships with each other.
The scariest aspect of all of this is that this malaise may be permanent and no longer transitory as we all thought it would be when it started to manifest itself in the 1990s.
To be continued...
