An Afternoon in the Drunk Tank in Kyiv-

An Afternoon in the Drunk Tank in Kyiv-

Within a few minutes we pulled up to a police station.  We got out of the car and they brought me in.  We went through a few rooms with cops everywhere and came up to a window.  The cop behind the glass asked for my passport.  I gave it over and he started leafing through it.  Since I was entering a new, previously unknown, phase of police harassment, I decided to call Polina, our office manager.  I wasn’t in a hurry or too worried, but I didn’t want to get lost in the bureaucracy of a police station in northern Kiev without anyone knowing where I was.  I told the police to wait a minute and made a call on my cell phone.  Polina answered almost immediately, but with a voice that betrayed the fact that she didn’t want to be bothered by me once again over a weekend.  We spoke in English, which the cops couldn’t understand at all. 

“Hi Michael.”

“Hi Polina.  I think I may have a small problem.  I’m at a police station in Podil and the cops just took my passport.”

“YOU’RE AT POLICE STATION!  OH MY GOD- WHAT HAPPENING?”  

Well, that clearly got her attention. 

“Please don’t worry, everything is fine.  They are just harassing me for a bribe that I won’t pay.  Maybe you can talk to them and tell them I work for a Ukrainian company and that I’m supposed to be here?”

“OH YES, OH MY GOD.  PUT THE PHONE TO THEM.”  I felt a warmth rising inside me that she cared so much about me.  Polina earned some good points with me because of this reaction. 

“Polina, please relax.  Everything is fine.  I told you in the office that this happens to me all the time here.  It’s because of my skin color.  You know as well as I do that my papers are in order.  Here’s the cop.  Don’t be nervous, just tell this guy that I work for the bank and I am supposed to be here.  Please breathe and be calm.”  I heard her take a deep breath.

“Ok Michael.”

I handed the phone under the glass to the copper.  He took it and they had a conversation.  A few minutes went by and then he hung up the phone and handed it back.  I was about to call her to see what the hell was going on when the cop who spoke with Polina started talking to the cops that brought me in.  I didn’t understand it, but they did.  They immediately brought me to a back room. 

Once there, they opened a green wooden door with a fogged out glass pane in it and pushed me into a dark room.  The door immediately shut and the lock turned behind me.  I turned on my phone to make a call, but I had lost the signal.  Bastards- I thought to myself. 

I looked around the room.  It was a holding cell about six feet wide and eight feet long.  There was a small bench that ran around the perimeter of the room for people to sit on.  The room had four other people in there with me.  All of them looked homeless and drunk.  All but one of them were passed out.  It smelled of terrible body odor mixed with urine, vomit and feces.  The holding cell was as dirty as my fellow inmates.  The only light was what made it through the fogged out glass in the door, which was also covered in a thick layer of filth.  Needless to say, it was pretty dark in there. 

After a few minutes, my eyes adjusted and I could see pretty well.  I sat down on the bench near the door.  This was before mobile phones had flashlights or anything, so I just sat there and thought about what was happening to me, the room itself, the foul stench and the people I was now surrounded by.  I also wondered if there were roaches in there with us.  There had to be.  All the people looked broken, tired and lost.  The one other guy who was awake immediately came over and sat next to me.  He was very close and his aroma of body odor, piss and vomit overpowered the general smell of the place.  It wasn’t very pleasant. 

He leaned on me, put his hand on my shoulder and said something in slurred, heavily accented Russian.  I had no idea what he said, but I looked him straight in the eyes.  He was dark skinned like me, most probably from Georgia or the Caucus.  I felt for him and his predicament.  These fellows were the underside of society.  The ones that embraced alcoholism to get through the economic hardship and racism that constantly confronted them amid the chaos of the social and economic transition that was taking pace all around them.    

“I don’t speak Russia very good.”  I said to him in my Russian.

He held my gaze and repeated slowly, “Yes, yes. What happened?  Why are you here?”

“Police.  They want my money.  I will not pay them.”  I replied in my broken Russian.  He smiled and shook his head up and down.

“We have the same problem.”

“I don’t think so, but who knows.”  Was all I could say.  At this point he was leaning into me with his hand on my shoulder.  The disposable 35mm camera I had in my coat pocket was on his side, so he was pushing it into my upper kidney.  This gave me an idea.  I pushed him off me, gently of course, and took out the camera.  It had a flash on it, so I turned it on and waited for the light to turn orange to indicate that it was ready.  How great it would be to document this experience with some photos I thought.  It was good luck that I brought this camera with me this morning.  I put my arm around the bum next to me, held the camera away at arms length, put on a big toothy smile and took the shot.  The flash burst out like lightening.  I rolled it to the next frame, waited for the flash and then took another of my new friend and me.  Then I took one of the two guys passed out directly in front of me.  Each time the room erupted in light and now everyone was awake and staring at me.  I was laughing and having fun.  My friend to my right was also loving it.  I took a shot of him laughing.  I guess that was too much for the cops though, as they noticed the flash going off and after the last one, a cop opened the door with a scowl demanding to know what was going on.

“Photos.  I’m just doing some photos.”  I said meekly pointing to my camera.  I didn’t know the word for taking photos, so I used doing, which could maybe be translated as making I thought.  The cop wasn’t happy.  All the bums were enjoying this thoroughly though and with the door opened I could see that none of them had many teeth and they really were totally filthy.  My heart felt for them again.  The cop’s didn’t.  He yelled at everyone to shut up and be quiet.  He took my camera and shut the door forcibly.  

“Whores!” my bum said to me referring to the cops. 

“Da, it fucked up (pizdyets).”  I said in agreement.  I had recently learned some bad words in Russian and this seemed like the right place to try them out in conversation for the first time.  My bum loved it- he laughed and again put his arm on my shoulder in an open display of camaraderie. 

After another ten or twenty minutes, the door opened again and the cop motioned for me to get up and follow him.  I shook the hand of the guy next to me and wished him luck and then got up and started walking out of the holding cell while saying “goodbye” and waving to the others.  The cop looked quite confused by this display of friendship and respect for my fellow prisoners.  Once out of the cell, he locked the door, handed me my camera and I followed him back to the front area where the guy at the window had taken my passport earlier.

Once there I saw Yuri, our head of research.  My heart sunk.  I had no idea Polina would make this a five alarm fire.  Yuri looked really nervous and concerned, but once I spoke to him I realized it was just a general fear of his of dealing with the corrupt police.  I went to the window, the guy behind it handed my passport back and we were free to go. 

I asked Yuri what happened.  He said that the cops told Polina that someone from my office had to come get me and since my boss was back in Prague for the weekend, she called him.  He also said that he had to pay forty Hrvnyas (UAH 40) as a fine.  That equaled about $20 and I flipped out. 

“A fine for what?  I didn’t do anything wrong!”  I said with shock and anger.

“Michael, it's forty Hrvnyas.  It’s nothing.  This is how the country works.”

“It’s not right and I didn’t want to pay them anything- that’s why I got arrested in the first place- I didn’t do anything wrong!” 

“The police will use it to buy vodka and cigarettes.  It’s the way it is.”  And with that, Yuri was done with this topic and didn’t want to talk about it.  He wanted to go back to his family and day off.  I gave him the UAH 40 as we walked to his car.  He offered me a ride, but I didn’t want to hassle him and told him I would rather walk.  He insisted on taking me home fearing I would get in trouble again.  I didn’t want to make a scene and who knows, maybe the original police that hassled me were still patrolling the neighborhood, so I got into his car to avoid a confrontation.

Once back at my apartment, we said goodbye and I apologized again for bothering him on a Sunday.  He drove off.  When I was back in the friendly confines of my apartment I was still upset that Yuri didn’t fight the fine, but it was too late now.  I opened a bottle of wine and kicked back on my couch to digest this latest run in with the Kiev police.

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Hey Readers!  Want another tale from Ukraine in the early days?   Here you go!  

https://libertinereflections.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-benefits-of-having-positive.html

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A Life Lesson Remembered after a Failed Dinner Party

A Life Lesson Remembered after a Failed Dinner Party

Sometimes, we try so hard to fit in, please other people or have things go a particular way that we cause the very outcomes we are trying to avoid and we then let ourselves get into a rut over it.  We take ourselves so seriously that we forget that there is an immense and complicated nature behind all that we are and all that we do and by trying to control or over interpret events, we are just setting ourselves up for failure- both real and wrongfully perceived. 

I had a small dinner party last weekend and by trying my best to have it go a certain way, I went against my instincts on certain aspects of it and by doing that, it went exactly the way I didn’t want it to go in the first place.  After ruminating on how the evening turned out for a couple days, I remembered the old Taoist parable about the Chinese farmer and finally let it go and moved on.  The parable goes something like this:

There once was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away one day.  That night, his neighbor came over and told him how unfortunate it was that the horse ran away, to which the farmer replied, “maybe”.   

The next day, the horse returned to the farm and brought four wild horses along with him.  That night, his neighbor came over and said how wonderful and great it was for him to have his horse back and to have four new horses, to which the farmer replied, “maybe”.

The day after that his son, who was trying to tame one of the new horses, was thrown and badly broke his leg.  That night, his neighbor came over and told the farmer how terrible it was that his son broke his leg, to which the farmer replied, “maybe”.

The next day, the Emperor’s conscription officers came by looking to draft new recruits for the war, but they rejected the son because of his broken leg and left.  That night, his neighbor came over and said how wonderful and fortunate it was that his son had avoided being sent to the war, to which the farmer replied, “maybe.”

There is an arrogance that quietly creeps into us, especially as we get older, and this can allow our ego to get so far ahead of our capabilities that the only possible outcome we create for ourselves is disappointment.  I have often marveled at how, when I look back at my life, my biggest misfortunes laid the very groundwork for my largest successes.  This is a lesson not to be forgotten or overlooked.  One example is, early in my career, I had my business partner steal the company away from me.  I lost everything and felt crushed and betrayed, but from that misfortune, I pushed forward and moved to Moscow and created a new pathway for my life.  This in turn opened the door to many more complex and diverse experiences that I otherwise would never have had or even contemplated being possible if the motivating misfortune had not occurred.

We need to change the way we view our lives and what we benchmark them against.  So many of us are terrified of making mistakes, incurring failures or saying or doing the wrong things that we handicap ourselves and turn away from opportunities for growth and progress.  We need to accept and embrace that life is a constant series of mistakes and we will continue making them, as they are a result of pushing ourselves forward.  Often, we wrongly perceive things only through the prism of negatives or positives, when in fact, we have no idea what they are, as the consequences from these very events are yet to be determined.

We must accept that the path to happiness and contentment runs through failure and misfortune.  Misfortune, good fortune, joy, depression- they’re all cut from the same cloth and as such, we need to broaden our vision to accept failure, both public and private, as easily as we accept success and see all occurrences as opportunities to better ourselves or to find and take a different pathway forward as our life journey continues.  

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A Country Divided Cannot Stand

A Country Divided Cannot Stand

Over the last couple years, when our society, and Western civilization in general, has been declining too rapidly for my comfort, but still, not fast enough to wake up the broader masses to the insanity of it all, I’ve been stuck waiting in a purgatory of sorts filled with dread, impending doom, and a fear of total disaster that has only been mitigated by a resilient hope that something unexpected and massive would occur in the 2018 Midterm Elections that would set the ship right again.  Unfortunately, my over-optimism was misplaced and today has not been such a good one, but as the results sink in, it’s not as bad as it could’ve been either and, barring a total meltdown to anarchy, the stage is set for further advances.

In all honesty, the election went the way most pollsters called it, with the House changing hands to the Democrats (picking up 30-40 seats) and the Republicans picking up a few seats in the Senate.  However, after the troubling last two years of the Trump presidency and such a divisive GOP campaign centered on racism, hatred, division, voter suppression, endless dishonestly and outright lying, I had thought the polls would break hard to the left and that the Senate was in play, which is where my initial depression is rooted. 

At this moment, the Dems have taken 223 seats in the House, while the Republicans have 199 with 13 races still outstanding that should largely go to the Dems as well.  The Senate is 53-45 with a few races still too close to call and the Dems did manage to secure some key governorships, including Wisconsin and Kansas, so there is some light to cling to, but I keep asking myself how America has become such an angry and divided country where facts, honesty, goodwill towards others, science and righteous leadership do not mean anything.     

Today, Trump held a news conference where he claimed a “great victory” in the midterms that “defied history”, but he was just as angry and deranged as usual.  It is a scary thing to behold.  Trump offered to work with the Democrats in the House to find some common ground, but then, in the same breath, said only if they do not use their oversight powers to investigate him and his administration.  He then threatened that if they do investigate, he will have the DoJ investigate them.  It’s so Mickey Mouse, it’s ridiculous that this is the state of US politics and government.

Of course, we need to honestly investigate and provide the check and balance on the Executive branch as the Constitution envisions the House to do.  No more rubber stamping, which is what congresses do in authoritarian states.  We won’t be losing much of an opportunity to get anything legislatively done, as with annual deficits of around $1 trillion for the foreseeable future, there isn’t much funding available without raising taxes, which the GOP will not do.  Also, we are in a war for the soul of our country and with so much blatant corruption in this administration, there is a lot of low hanging fruit that we need to take- violations of the Emoluments Clause is an obvious place to start, as is Russia interference, money laundering of the Trump Organization, Zinke, Pruitt, countless Hatch Act violations, nonsecure Iphone use, spilling classified secrets to the Russians, and so much more.  

Also today, Attorney General Jeff Sessions resigned at the behest of the president and his acting replacement has been on the record for over a year saying that the Mueller investigation is a witch hunt that should be reined in with its budget cut to the point where it will have no choice but to come to a halt.  I think the chances of this happening in some form are quite high, so the Dems will need to immediately put the pieces back together and ensure this investigation has the resources (and protection) to come to its rightful conclusion when they take the House in January, but of course, this will delay everything even further (barring some major indictments and reports that may come out over the near term).  

Now that I’ve digested everything, there is some good news.  As we start honestly investigating this administration in 2019 when the new Congress comes to office, the massive tax cuts that juiced the economy in 2018 will have largely faded and with higher inflation from the tariff war with China still being felt, sentiment toward the president will continue to be low and falling. This will give the Dems more support from the electorate to investigate.  From these investigations, and the Mueller report (whenever it is issued), a strong case will likely emerge that should undermine the President and the GOP in the next election cycle and, if we can put up another batch of good candidates and a young, dynamic presidential contender, we should be able to take the White House, the Senate and add to our House majority, which could finally allow the country to take some serious steps in the right direction and reform our system for the better.  

As Lincoln said, “a house divided against itself, cannot stand.  I believe this government cannot endure permanently…I do not expect the house to fall- but I do expect it will cease to be divided.  It will become all one thing or all the other.”   This rationale is relevant again today.  The Left has the numbers and we will overcome and rid our politics of this pestilence eating away at our values, morals, ethics and democracy.   We will continue to fight onward and upward! 

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