MINUTES of a MONDAY #127
A couple of offerings to get your week off to a flyer
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Slán - Niall☘️ **
📻REAL LIFE AUDIO 👇🏽🎧
BRAIN FOOD: The Lost Golden Age of the Past
“Most of these hopes for immediate wealth were quickly dashed. The pattern of change was remarkably uniform. Virtually everywhere old Government controls on the economy were swiftly dismantled, while privitisation of state property progressed at a startling rate. Apartments and homes suddenly gained private owners. Jobs disappeared. Farm cooperatives were shuttered. Most of the shipyard workers who had brought the Polish Communist Party to its knees by protesting in Gdańsk and sparking the Solidarity movement, lived long enough to see their workplaces sold for scrap. The same would eventually prove true for much of the rest of the region’s heavy industry.
All of this restructuring resulted in skyrocketing unemployment, combined with breathtaking inflation. Everywhere, the accumulated gains of entire lifetimes were metling into the air. Especially for the old, it was a time of terrible dislocation. Many longed for a return to the old days, when employment was predicatable and the state took care of their health and welfare. Now, suddently, Doctors expected cash, while cash seemed to lose value by the day. It only took a brief taste of the chaos of the free market to make the past seem like a lost golden age.
In the words of one Hungarian farmworker, “János Kádár tried for 30 years to make people love communism, and he failed completelty; but the present government have succeeded in just two years!”
An extract from Goodby Eastern Europe by Jakob Mikanowsi
SOUL FOOD:
“Pain, or love or danger makes you feel real again.”
Jack Kerouac
LOL:
Matt le Blanc, or Joey from Friends, on how you’re not really famous until you’re famous in a cave:
APPENDIX:
“Perfect days don't compound. Consistent ones do.”
A.O.B.
That’s us for #127 amigo.
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And, as always, mind how you go out there - Niall