I am sure that many people mix up dry with wet about the Genocide symbol of forget-me-not. Like with many-many other spheres in our life, ugly phenomena, mentally or for promotional purposes, are associated with such things, which should be treated gently. It is very likely that forget-me-not is sometimes fixed in wrong places, it is also likely that some people are doing business on it. But to attack the forget-me-not, trying to humiliate and ridicule the symbol of the Genocide Centennial, it seems to me, is wrong. It would mean not to display enough respect for our martyred compatriots.
With the help of this flower, we perhaps, in uncompleted and not to the end developed way, are trying to show what unites us. Pouring your own social or political malice on it, your personal dissatisfaction and trying to play populism through it, in my opinion, it is not the best behavior. And if there are people who receive illegal profits from forget-me-not, they should be identified. If this symbol is used by somebody else’s by mistake, then it is necessary to alert about such cases. But undue generalizations should not be made. It is the same as saying after listening to Artash Asatryan’s unpleasant and extremely rabis song about the Genocide that all the works dedicated to the centennial are bad.
Similarly, I distinguish my faith from my attitude to high Christian values towards our senior “oligarchic” clergymen. What the Christian doctrine teaches is much higher from any guilty mortal’s behavior, regardless of what religious or secular “shoulder straps” he wears. Let us be discreet, modest, temperate rather than think all day long about luxury and the clergymen buried in oblivion.
Similarly, I distinguish the Armenian state that I love from the people who temporarily occupy this or that position. When people say, “the state should give me this and this,” they forget that they are the state, we all are the state. We are to establish this institution rather than demand from others. This idea seems bizarre to many people.
ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
