Three Days on a Desert Island Without Snuff

A friend and colleague of my father’s, a legendary Dnevnik photojournalist, when asked in the 1970s what it had been like in the Partisans, replied that it had been very hard. For wine there was only refosco, and for salami only Hungarian.

It was gallows humor, at once a defense mechanism against painful memories of a traumatic war experience and a sotto voce criticism of the ideological instrumentalization of that experience under the previous system. Because war is always shit. And it is nothing unusual for people to respond to their experience of it in different ways—sometimes in ways that are hard for us to understand.

That is why, when I watched the footage of a young evacuee who, on his return to Brnik airport, complained that he hadn’t been given a hot meal on the flight from the war zone, my first thought was that he was joking. Gallows humor. Because war is shit. Even if you experience it only briefly, as a tourist who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It is easy to comment from armchairs and make fun of people who found themselves in this situation. In which, overnight, rockets and drones started exploding around their hotels. And who suddenly didn’t know how to get themselves out of this mess and back home to safety. It is true that it was mainly military targets in the Gulf states that were attacked, and the number of civilian casualties—with the exception of Iran, Lebanon and Israel—has been, at least so far, relatively limited. But when you are crouching in a hotel room with bombs falling around you, such rationalizing is harder than from a safe distance.

So it is entirely understandable that people in such a situation react emotionally and fearfully. That they are not in a state to recite, in answer to a journalist’s question, a PR-perfect statement that would please us all.

But with the young man who made the unfortunate statement at Brnik, it was not gallows humor. Nor did I detect in his statement any response to the danger of the situation he had managed to escape thanks to transport that the Slovenian government had organized very quickly. He did not seem traumatized by the war that is still raging where he came back from. He was traumatized by sandwiches. For wine only refosco, for salami only Hungarian.

In essence, he came across like someone who had been stranded at an airport by force majeure, missed his plane, and then cursed the agency or airline that took his money for the trip and then left him in the lurch.

A typical situation that regularly happens to anyone who travels often. Sometimes because of a volcano in Iceland or an unannounced strike, sometimes because they sell too many tickets and the cabin door is shut in your face. People are angry in these situations and say all sorts of things.

But this young man was not overbooked; he was evacuated. From a war zone. Relatively quickly and, unlike many tourists from other parts of the world, at the state’s expense.

OK, he was tired and sleep-deprived. Probably frightened too, although he didn’t talk about it. Still, one might have expected from him more contextual intelligence, which would have prevented him from coming across to the entire Slovenian public as an arrogant, spoiled brat. Me, me, me. Most people who went through a similar experience had no problem with it.

After his statement provoked a storm of reactions and no small amount of mockery, voices have also been heard defending him. I too think he could slowly be left in peace. He has probably realized himself that he blew it.

His statement was certainly inappropriate and probably thoughtless, but on the other hand it is not only about him. Arrogance, selfishness and problems with empathy are characteristics of the state of mind in today’s society.

Moreover, the statement, through no fault of his own, resonated even more than it otherwise would have.

On the one hand, it came at a moment of pre-election fever, and the story of the evacuation of Slovenian citizens from a war zone was immediately recognized as gratifying material for pre-election squabbling between political parties. For all their fervent invocations of overcoming differences and national unity, our political leaders, at moments when they really could and should stand together, always and every time fail the test.

The media bear their share of responsibility too. The clickbait struggle for survival forces them into “reporting” that is more or less limited to chasing one statement or another. First from the people who found themselves in this predicament and who naturally react emotionally and subjectively. “It seemed to me they were rescuing everyone else before us,” went one typical headline.

Then politicians are asked for their opinions, and they react less emotionally, but no more objectively.

Publishing opinions is of course perfectly OK, but quality and credible journalism also needs facts. If one person says it is raining and another says it isn’t, the journalist’s job is to look out of the window, as Hubert Mewhinney of the Texas Spectator said back in the 1940s.

But evidently there is little interest in facts; anger sells much better. Amid all the media attention on the Slovenian evacuation, I came across few pieces that clearly and comprehensively presented the circumstances and difficulty of rescuing people from a war zone and compared the speed and efficiency of the Slovenian rescue with the experiences of other countries. If it turns out that the government did a bad job, it deserves criticism. If it turns out that, given the difficulty of the situation and the experience of others, it was successful, then it would be decent and fair to acknowledge this, regardless of the feelings anyone otherwise harbors toward it.

This does not mean that those in power should not be criticized, disagreed with or asked for more. But it would be nice if, in doing so, we thought critically and relied on facts.

Looked out of the window now and then. Then we can quarrel to our hearts’ content. About hot meals and other important things too. We do live in a democracy, after all.