Longing for business

In Bunin's "Village", the hero, having chewed the ice cream bought at the fair, drives home, looks around the poor, but boundless, withered fields, powerful in their potential, and thinks: "If only there was an owner!"

This, of course, is very bourgeois, kulak-like - the owner.

In fact, what is needed is not so much an owner, but what is needed is a cause that would capture the people into a single whole and turn them towards self-confidence and work.

In this regard, Gogol, expecting the word “forward,” is much more accurate, because “forward” is the beginning of the matter.

For twenty years we have been faced with the same alternative: “forward” or “master”? Society was divided in opinion.

In the first case, “forward” must be extracted, generated from oneself. Painful. Reluctance.

In the second - to entrust this matter to the “owner”, they say, he will figure it out himself whether it is necessary to “go forward” or not. What about us, we’re okay, we’ve made our contribution, what’s the demand from us?

However, this division into those who want to “go forward” and those who crave the “master” does not say anything new. Something else is much more interesting - that “forward”, that is, that very business was intercepted by those who actually want not the business, but the owner. He doesn’t want these fields to get ears, not to bloom, but to make money for this very owner. Not so that the earth would give birth in general, but so that it would give birth for him.

Our entire liberal public is shouting about the cause, but does it, whose value is the individual, need the cause itself? No, she needs an individual owner, whose whole job will come down to sucking the essence out of this matter.

On the contrary, our entire patriotic-sovereign public is waving them around with the images and Images of the Tsar-Father, Stalin, without realizing that what it wants, in depth, is not the owner, but the cause.

And the main thing is that it is they, and not the guys from HSE, who are truly ready for this very important matter.

The country was yearning for the cause, drunk, tired, dirty, burning with impatience. How important the matter was can be judged by the enthusiasm and enthusiasm with which they destroyed the Soviet cause, which had ceased to be a cause and turned into a field overgrown with weeds, on which one can again, as of old, dream about the cause.

That's exactly what to dream about. Because there is no need for action from above.

Imitation of activity and deeds, with complete lethargy of the mind, conscience and atrophy of muscles and will. No worse than the good old “five-year plan in four years”. On paper, of course.

Meanwhile, there is nothing better than the poetry of a factory whistle throughout the country. So that you get up every day as if it were your shift, so that your body aches from sweet fatigue, so that you leave work and feel that you are doing a good, kind, useful thing with all people. To walk calmly, like an honest working man.

In recent years, everyone has been vying with each other, from priests to smart businessmen (what an amazing unanimity between business and the Church) offering to do small things. Clean up the entrance, make a bird feeder, give a pretty penny, hang out at the hospice for the sake of humanism.

It seems like the proposals are business ones, and you need to get involved. It is necessary that the light bulbs in the entrance are lit and “the child does not cry.” But we have read Agnia Lvovna Barto, and we don’t fall for that. They say that while they dream of great things, everything around them collapses. But even small things are done and have meaning when the great, the big, shines through it.

There is no point in washing the entrance once, just like giving a beggar a single penny. If the goal is so that the child does not cry, then whatever one may say, it is necessary that it does not cry not only now, not get on your nerves, but not cry at all.

That is, small things make sense only when they become regular, and their results accumulate and are preserved.

This is not the case. A light bulb will be broken, but a penny will not alleviate poverty for a beggar.

Small things without big ones turn into bad infinity.

Therefore, people are waiting for a big deal, a goal, a task.