Should we fast or vote?

2025-03-28 08:46:00, Opinione Ilnisa Agolli

In a world where people live this March the same as any other month, I feel like saying that I'm not understanding anything anymore. This is because in the six days of this week I managed to understand that only religion has a meaning. Religion and politics. I remember once Tor Pustina when he told me on the seventh day of the week: " How rarely does a miracle happen even if it hasn't happened yet ."

It was 2003, election season I think. Enough time has passed since then and we are back in another electoral campaign. It seems strange to me that after every combination of factors or beliefs that have come and gone…I still find time for romantic escapism like this that is nothing more than a common question mark. The same as “Politics and Religion”, a no less common answer. At least in Albania!

All this Hamlet-esque banter came to me after an Iftar where none of the believers or other attendees noticed that it was my first time and I don't belong to this ritual. Maybe that's why I don't fast.

After the first course, where none of the strangers at the round table spoke, I preferred to silently remember Nolin. “The first words of religion are kept as they are taught,” he says. Now that I think about it, I would really like to wait for the second course with him and Elie Wiesel, a Jewish-American writer who survived the Holocaust. Perhaps this would increase my appetite and, of course, my optimism.

The question he passionately asks about the similar situation I found myself in during this blessed month of Ramadan, when Albanians pray fervently and hope that Allah will accept their humble sacrifice, something that the Jewish nation called the "Day of Repentance" and which was spent with a 25-hour fast and subsequent prayer, came to mind. Wiesel asks:

"Should we fast or not? Fasting would definitely cause us a much quicker and more certain death. Why should we prove to God that even here, locked in Hell, we are able to praise Him and Him alone?"

I like this writer. Or I like the fact that he is both a man and a writer. Or maybe I have only known writers and no men who are also writers.

Anyway, after Iftar I went to meet Robin and my mind was on God. The only writer who is already a savior of the time. At least this penultimate one can be met more easily, I said to myself and he could cut the thread of my thoughts by telling me about his stupidities with the campaign plans. He is a tailor and this time that I am no longer understanding, I share with him as he does with those statuses on social networks every day, and, totally predictable from his own unit or branch as political actors call it.

"We'll go drink in Montmartre," he said, facing the darkness of my sincere eyes. "As soon as the Party wins, as soon as the Party wins!" he shouted twice, clapping his hands.

If I had sewn things differently, I told him, maybe I wouldn't even have ordered your suit ahead of time for my funeral ceremony and even worse, I would be wearing it today while I'm still alive and coming from an Iftar. A living, unburied woman who protests to God, a living woman who doesn't fast and I don't think she even has to vote. You know what, Robin, I always thought there was time to tear and sew, but I'm realizing that there's no time to die either.

Drink, repentance and death, the tailor spoke, blowing his nose under a washed and quite ordinary handkerchief, are connected only by the bad luck of the believer as if from a parallel universe. But more or less there may be a God there too, and he must have divided his parties as he has done here.

Robin, you have no taste, I told him, but you choose good wine, you sleep well, you are enthusiastic and the only person I know who worries for nothing. So enough to be envied for these qualities that, let's say, I don't have.

The other one didn't speak. He put his hand in his left pocket and suddenly got up from the table.

I stared at it as I would at a plaster work of art that is suddenly hit by a high school student who inadvertently sets an entire class in motion. No way.

"Do you like my suit?" he asked, still not quite at the table.

You Robin forget that your suits are not like the years we have numbered, nor like those ballots in the ballot box that you are waiting to count; while you forget that only the country can survive for centuries, along with the parties and the believers. Country, politics and religion.

Do you understand?

No, he said. Of course, I told him because he doesn't fast, but he votes. Have you ever thought about doing the opposite?

No, he gave it back to me. Do you know why you don't think about it, Robin? Because even when you do, you don't actually do it. But you believe that you do it and that's what matters. Although I'm convinced that more than in God, you believe in time. In what your Party tears apart and you sew it back together every four years. You have a hard job.

Treat it on the podcast, give it back to me and call it " Double Six of a Process ."

Anyway, I would do both if I could, he said quietly. Do you know why? Because I used to pray and repent. Now that I don't repent, I pray less and observe more. It's more or less the same with the wordplay you make on and off the show. I'm a tailor, after all.

Yes, yes, Robin. You're right, you're a bit of a seamstress. Especially when you're sitting in that car waiting to finish the next suit.

Similar in scene to the order Hamlet gave to his servant, when he sent him as a courier. The latter asked him:

"Must I tell you everything word for word?" "Say it as you like," said Hamlet, "but don't forget the gist."

I read this last night in an early article by a publicist who is now prime minister with his pen aside and a bag of errands on his back, while I shoulder only this issue:

Should we fast or vote? / CNA