Anxieties and lived experiences

To compare the "anxious moderns'" anxieties about the future with what the conservative segment lived through in the past and in many spheres still lives through is, I know, a futile undertaking, but not a day passes that we are not made to undertake this futile thing.

Keeping people busy with futile things is a way of diluting a truth and dulling the most basic human sensibilities toward it. Immediately setting what was done to oneself, magnified, against what was done to another; when the need arises to face oneself, immediately holding the mirror up to someone else; when invited to conscience, immediately getting into profit-and-loss calculations...

What can we do, the human condition has a level like this too, and this level frequently crosses the path of anyone who takes the struggle for rights and law a little seriously, who has set aside a bit of room for this struggle in his life.

That the decisive factor in politics, as a human condition, is "friendship" and "enmity" is at the same time a part of our tragedy. It seems impossible for those who have adopted politics as a search for virtue to operate without being caught in a circle of enmity determined long before them. In this circle, where wanting for another what one wants for oneself, or not wanting for another what one does not want for oneself, is considered strange, it becomes inevitable that the struggle for virtue too falls onto its own "friend-enemy" axis.

This much is normal, and although the "continuation" is also normal, it is not a fate, and it should be recalled that the struggle for virtue against this circle is merely much harder. In this respect our tragedy is not an insurmountable fate. Yet what we call the "continuation" is that a virtue-centered alliance and enmity begins to be "instrumentalized," "secularized" within the process of power and to sink into unchangeable categorizations.

Anyway, what comes after this belongs to another subject...

New documents that have emerged about the Balyoz action plan show that the coup plotters even considered having the "open education high schools," which they regarded as "a last resource in which religious people look for educational opportunities," shut down. The preparatory report shows with figures how the education of the hundreds of thousands of İmam-Hatip high school students has been prevented by the successful "measures" (!) taken so far, but it proposes that measures be taken to block this path too, since these segments, having no remaining way to "infiltrate" universities, are nevertheless resorting to this path in order to be able to go to university.

Those who see no harm in their educational rights being blocked in this way, in their being subjected in a sense to an educational genocide, are the children and youth of this country. What could these children have done to be deprived of educational opportunities in the spring of their lives with a thoroughly assassination-like logic? With what qualities have they deserved such a hostile attitude? After sowing this seed of enmity that will affect, in the end, millions of people of this country whose government is sought even by a coup, what kind of society is envisaged to be reaped?

Dear God! What kind of "war game" has been played, what kind of brilliant intelligence performance has been displayed, in order to darken the futures of these youths and cut them off from life.

To say "it didn't succeed anyway" would be to make fun of everyone's intelligence; this latest attempt constitutes only the latest link of what was done before and what continues to be done. The coefficient practice continued for 13 years to darken the lives of the İmam-Hatip students, suddenly declared enemies of the country, and of the vocational high school students along with them. The latest practice, that fascist one without the least share of virtue, consists merely of a plan to close a forgotten ventilation gap. Far worse had already been done, and is still being done.

Yet today the education strategy adopted by the YÖK administration under Prof. Yusuf Ziya Özcan envisages that nobody who wants to study and cannot do so remains. Depriving any human being of an educational opportunity, on whatever grounds, is an inhuman practice that must be tried and condemned.

Türkiye's sociology is in fact changing every day because of this higher-education mobilization, which makes it possible for every stratum of society to be carried to the center. As İsmet Berkan wrote, in this period a population in a proportion not comparable to earlier ones has been carried from the periphery to the center. A politics that allows this sociological mobility is a new politics for Türkiye, and is a requirement of a virtuous and embracing approach.

Frankly, the only thing that would justify what is today expressed as anxious modernity is the loosening of this shackle on the segments for whom, until yesterday, being subjected to every kind of discrimination was seen as "normal" and had become habitual. To be able to invent, against what they have lived and in many places still continue to live, a kind of "oppression" such as not being able to drink alcohol at whatever point one wishes is, to put it mildly, a perfect example of brazenness.

You can add to our tragedy that against this brazenness there is nothing to say other than "I give up."