As the Oct. 26 parliamentary Election Day approached, I was
somehow convinced it would be different this time. All of my friends, family
members, colleagues and former classmates seemed to be so responsible in making
their voting decisions. The whole nation seemed to be so totally changed after
the EuroMaidan Revolution. And I swear I could see pink fairies of better
times to come flying among all those smiling people with passports in
their hands at my polling station.
And seeing a trembling 90-year-old man at the polling
station completed the impression. After all, coming to the station at this age
requires some civic consciousness.
“Why wouldn’t they send someone so he could vote at
home,” I said to my parents.
I was so affected by the state’s negligence
and the fact that the old man had to come all the way to the polling station to
cast a ballot that I almost cried.
When I was done voting, an observer came to me and asked to
help the old man to vote.
“He is blind and doesn’t have any relatives. And we don’t
have the right to help. Would you please,” the woman asked.
Oh! Of course I would. The whole thing now seemed more like
a life mission! Weren’t we all standing on the Maidan the whole winter so that
each and every man in the country could make a democratic choice? And now
helping a blind war veteran to vote seemed the surest way to bring those
ideals to fruition.
So I walked the old man to the booth, gave him a pen and
explained which ballot was for what.
“Thank you, my child,” the old man told me in perfect
Ukrainian. “Now would you please help me find the Communist Party and someone
from the Party Of Regions in the single-mandate list,” he said.
Oh, he was blind indeed! Alas, I was too
honest to mark the wrong box in the ballot. Trying to
convince him to make a different decision was kind of too late.
The official vote count is nearly 90 percent complete now
and it proves that the old man at my polling station wasn’t the only blind one
voting for my future. Some 1.3 million Ukrainians – over 9.4 percent of all of
those who voted – came to the polling stations on Oct. 26 and voted blindly for
the Opposition Bloc, a rebranded Party of Regions, stuffed with allies of
former President Viktor Yanukovych. Nearly 600,000 people, some 3.9 percent,
gave their votes to the Communists, a populist party parasitizing on the memory
of the Soviet Union.
The fact that the man spent most of his life under the Soviets
is not an excuse. My grandmother is 88. She has watched each and every
political show before Election Day “to make a good choice,” as she
said. She made one. And believe it or not, voting for a Communist was
never an option.
Age has nothing to do with it as well. This spring in
Kharkiv I saw young women in Zara outfits rallying for separatist ideas and
inviting Russia to annex their region like it did with Crimea.
It’s shocking to realize that when it comes to people’s
mentality, not much has changed after the Revolution of Dignity, as a
lot of them still make their political choices irresponsibly. The lack of
information is no longer an excuse. Only rare tiny villages are cut from TV or
the Internet. The information is delivered on a plate to every corner of the
country and the only thing left to do is analyze it.
Learn more, use different sources of information, compare
facts. Or just switch TV channels from time to time. Just do it! This is simple
critical thinking.
If more Ukrainians put a little effort in analyzing
information, Ukraine’s new post-revolutionary parliament wouldn’t have some 60 lawmakers
who supported the so-called “dictatorship laws” on Jan. 16 – the boiling point
of Yanukovych’s vile regime.
Dear blind ones, five years until the next
election is long enough time to open your eyes. And I hope you will. But
you are to blame for the harm that may be done to Ukraine in-between.
Kyiv Post staff
writer Daryna Shevshenko can be reached at [email protected].
