Safeti didn't just pay lip service, but spoke with our money

2023-06-20 10:16:00, Opinione Andi Bushati

The moment the images of Safet Gjic's stallion arrived on my mobile phone, the first feeling that came to me, right there and then, was not disgust, but pity. With the uncured atavism of an Albanian male, I thought to myself: remember, it can happen. Of little importance were the wild insults in front of the female object, the sex in the mayor's office, spilling on the table where the files with the "problems of the people" were.

For many moralists they could constitute sufficient subject for a scandal. But inside myself, I don't know from what dark secret, the call to justify it came from me.

I had nothing but contempt for the character. I couldn't get his pro-Edi Rama statements out of my mind, when he quickly converted from a DP financier to a revivalist, as soon as the government changed. I had not removed from my visual memory several film images, when as the president of Kuksi, he had ordered the cameramen to film him in front of a bag of money, throwing coins of lek, as a reward, to the football players who had won an important match. I had not forgotten the stale campaign in Kamëz, the one of this May with the Kuksi dance, or the illiterate blunders that the media reported from the activity as mayor.

So, in politics, I despised him as one of the most banal of the renaissance's peevish arad.

Despite this, I wanted to see him as a victim. Not only that at the first look at the images of the video scandal, I got the impression that someone was behind the movement of the camera that was spying on him. But because I tried to understand the explosive world of emotions or desires, which sometimes defeats the person who has the obligation to behave correctly. A momentary "coup de foudre", a passionate adulterer, a return to a story left behind, can derail even the strongest man, forcing him to use the state office as a den of momentary animal passions.

It was a mistake to commit the act in a public environment, but let the one who didn't do it, or who didn't imagine it could happen, cast the first stone, I thought. So, the sense of justice to not blame someone, for what can happen to many people, led me to the tendency for justification. That's why I avoided the lynching ecstasy that spread like an epidemic on social networks. When they heard this reasoning, some of my friends, or especially my girlfriends, accused me of a sick masculinist solidarity. Even after this shame, you still have psychological problems, they accused me. The climax was reached by a stranger who wrote to me in my inbox: "hey, you who have been tearing up our walls for days against the government, how dare I burn you now that you have shut your mouth"?

In fact, I would have continued to remain silent, in this impossible fight with the guardians of morality, in the permanent challenge of those who earn loans by stepping on the victims, if the other part of the video, by the investigative journalist Artan Hoxha, had not appeared.

After looking closely at it, I realized that everything is much more banal than the debate between the sense of duty, or the sin of passion. The essence of what those images showed was not the violation of the ceremoniality of the institution, to the detriment of uncontrolled passions, but the use of the position as a ruler to ostracize. So the equation changes fourfold, since we are not dealing with the case of a man who had an affair and used the town hall environment as a motel to consume it. On the other hand, Safet Gjici had the power to do favors, and this, despite his appearance, education, education, vocabulary, gave him the opportunity to enjoy white meat. He was not the mayor who dissolved the office. He used his position as a politician to accomplish what he could not do as a man.

In this sense, his sin is not sexual, but similar to that of hundreds of other elected officials who use citizens' taxes for far more "moral" purposes than this, such as paying for private school for children, or a purse. expensive for the wife. In a society where patriarchal morality rules over that citizen, these latter are considered honest men, while poor Safet is stoned. And so it will be until we realize that, in fact, they are the same thing. They differ only in one point, in the way they consume the immeasurable power they have stolen from us.