One of our problems is that we do not know which of our rights are worth fighting for, and which cannot even be considered to be rights. For example, on Facebook Armenians fight for the right to seize a police regiment with arms for the sake of the right to kill, take hostages, and burn cars. In this case, we can consider all the articles of the Criminal Code as rights, not crimes.
Or let us view a “lighter case”. People are fighting for the right to drive at a speed of 100 kilometers per hour in the city and not to be fined. They offer different tricks to each other how to drive with that dangerous speed and not to be fined.
The same is with the right of smokers: sit indoors and get pleasure from poisoning others. But let us remember that the territory of Armenia is 29 thousand square kilometers. Buildings altogether comprise about 100 square kilometers. Consequently, 28 thousand 900 square kilometers are at the disposal of smokers. Get out of buildings and smoke as much as you want. Is there a better right than that?
Conversely, there are rights that should be protected. It is, first of all, the right to hold and express own beliefs. For instance, I hold views on certain matters that differ from the views of my fellow citizens, and I am obviously in the minority in the issues mentioned above, but no pressure from the majority, no blackmail can make me enter a general stream.
In the same way, a person has the right to decide how to dress, what color to dye his/her hair, when to start a sexual life, with whom, and how to spend it, etc. You can meet “qyartus” (a group of people in Armenia, who accept that the truth is one and only one) who do not accept this right both in remote mountainous villages as well as in the center of Yerevan, so there is no geographical or local problem here.
The problem is that we have many “offsprings of the nation”, but only very few citizens. As “offsprings of the nation” we can oppose, when someone’s behavior, in our opinion, does not correspond to our understanding of the “Armenian gene”. But since we are not citizens, we are extremely tolerant of people’s flagrant behavior.
Recently, a woman in a minibus scolded the driver and asked him not to smoke. The driver humbly threw the cigarette away, but muttered, “This country has totally become spoiled”.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
