By Ben Blushi-
WHY ARE THE CHILDREN PROTESTING
All these days I have been trying to understand who the people protesting are.
Why have they taken to the streets?
Why are they throwing stones?
Why are they tearing up pavements?
Why are they burning shops?
Why are they not afraid of the police?
What is the identity of the protester?
Where did he come from so suddenly?
In which social laboratory was he created?
Where was he until yesterday?
Why did he not exist in 1990, nor in 2000, nor in 2010, nor in 2020.
Why haven’t we seen this protester before?
Because he was born in recent years.
He was small and waited until he grew up to throw stones.
In my view, this type of protester was created by the one institution that should not have created him: the school.
The irreversible weakening of education over 30 years has created a social category that is no longer afraid of the state.
By teaching them nothing, the school has taught these children only one thing: to hate the state.
The passion with which they tear apart traffic lights, railings, bins, pavements and windows is something astonishing.
All these objects that organise our daily lives look to them like the weapons with which their main enemy attacks them: the state.
When they are protesting, they think they are at war.
Traffic lights look to them like the enemy’s red eyes, the cameras on poles are the binoculars with which he watches them, road posts look like rubber batons, the windows are the glasses with which the enemy protects himself from their Molotov cocktails, while the bins are the bags in which the enemy hides his war uniform.
Although all these objects also serve the protesters themselves, they do not like them.
They even despise them.
If they had the chance, they would burn every building and destroy every bridge, just as I would if I were in a class with them.
When I look at them, I remember myself as a student in 1990.
Back then too, students took to the streets to demand the fall of the government, but they did not break a single window, did not burn a single bin and did not tear up a single pavement.
For this very reason, the communists handed over power without anyone being beaten, because the students who took power did not make themselves targets to be beaten.
Yet at that time the students had more reasons to burn things.
Back then there was no private property, and everything belonged to the state.
By the standards of today’s protester, who thinks whatever belongs to the state should be burned, every bakery, every warehouse, every bridge, every office and every police car would have been flattened.
But that did not happen.
Nothing was touched.
In my view there is only one reason.
The school had taught the students of that time to separate the regime from the state.
We knew that communism was transitory.
When it left, the state would remain.
Although the dreadful textbooks we had did not give us this simple lesson, the school itself did.
School is not the books that make you an engineer, an economist or an architect.
School is the teachers’ passion to make their students good citizens.
Today, it seems, this no longer happens.
Their daily misery, unfair competition, selection through servility to the local MP, pressure to go to rallies out of desperation, violence to exchange votes for jobs, the shame of selling grades for money: teachers pour all of this, one after another, into the students’ heads, creating the most dangerous social cocktail for a country: hatred.
Hatred of everything is being taught in our schools as the first and only subject.
In this subject, all students get a ten without studying.
This is the cause of this protest.
Anyone who wants to see the gym where hatred is practised and perfected need only look at social networks.
The masks we see on the streets were stitched together in TikTok’s free shops.
There, an angel wearing a mask becomes a devil, and a devil without a mask can burn a school full of angels.
With social media masks on their faces, the children who have come out of schools in recent years have lived among us as strangers.
We have seen them, but they were not who we thought we saw.
When we saw them, we did not recognise them.
They were strangers covered by masks.
And as strangers they are burning, and they will keep burning.
They are presenting governments with the bill for the harmful experiments that were carried out on their schools.
Since the state destroyed the schools, they are destroying the state.
By their reckoning, they are right.
In football this result is called a draw; on the street of protest it is called revenge.
That is why this is the first protest in which only people born after the 90s take part.
This is the date when the destruction of the school began.
The stones gathered from the rubble of the schools are now falling on the Ministry of Education and on police officers who are not to blame.
Therefore the protest will continue.
Whether it succeeds or not, it will not stop.
When a ten-year-old becomes fifteen, he will do the same thing.
He will gather the school’s stones and throw them at the state.
Before us is a generation that wants what it does not have, but does not want what it has.
Neither this government nor the next one to follow will be able to subdue the street protester for a long time.
On the barricades of Durrës Street he has learned the first lesson of life.
Whenever you have a problem, burn a door; whenever you dislike a government, smash a window; and whenever you dislike anything at all, call it a revolution.
Until the revolution of the stones is over, the revolution of the schools cannot begin, and that would be our only solution.
But until that day, the protesters do not want to wait.
And they are not to blame.
This is the upbringing we gave them through our policies, which today we understand should be thrown in the bin.
Every generation must take responsibility for what it does.
And we must take responsibility for destroying our children’s schools.
That is why they have taken up stones and are throwing them at us.
And they are right to do so.
We deserve it.