“Of course, there is also the fault of the people. And the decaying fire of destruction grows hotter hour by hour. But it comes from above,” says one of Dostoevsky’s heroes. Indeed, the “top,” the elite, both formally in the form of the authorities and the form of authoritative people outside the rules, directly impacts the behavior and thinking of the people.
Drug addiction has reached dangerous levels in Armenia in the last five years, especially among teenagers. There are, of course, many reasons. But one of the main reasons, I think, is that today’s 30-40-year-old deputies and officials consider drug addiction a regular pastime, and before the revolution, they proposed to legalize marijuana.
If in the early 2000s, the “role model” behavior model was the oligarch surrounded by 20 bodyguards with shaved heads, walking around the city in a column stretching half a kilometer, now the model is the unshaven drug addict. Which is more rejectable? I find it difficult to say.
Drug addiction cannot be classified as a political problem, although the phenomenon’s scale directly harms our security. But I can give an example from the political sphere. To understand the influence of the elite, I want to give an example from the demonstrations in Israel a few months ago. (I know that today, Israel is not a state with which we can have very warm relations, but that circumstance is optional in this case; we are talking about the internal organization of the nation).
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There was a heated debate in that country about the functions of the Supreme Court. The government wanted to limit them, and those with opposition views believed that this was taking the country in the direction of authoritarianism. And one day, the supporters of both views ended up facing each other on the same street.
Suddenly, one of the protesters started singing Israel’s national anthem, and the people standing on both sides, staring at each other with malice, joined in the anthem, forming a full chorus.
Is something like that possible in Armenia? Of course not. And again, among the reasons, the most important are the impulses coming from “above.”
To put it mildly, the current government of Armenia presents a model of disrespectful attitude towards national symbols (until the Declaration of Independence)
Can we imagine any Jew proposing to replace Mount Zion with another mountain?
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
