Feng Shui Robot VI

Johnny’s response to this little story was predictable:

- The guy was obviously punished for what he had done. Some higher force decided that was how it should end up. – he said.

- I am not sure there was any higher force involved. Blind chance, perhaps. I really can't tell. And I think it is connected with the relationship between people. I believe that there is a strong connection between people. Having heard a story that my sister told me, I knew that that sort of connection exists.

It was in the second year of the attack on the city where we lived. Shells were falling all over the place. Civilian victims and casualties all around. We were at our apartment.

My sister is three years younger than me, and she was just 13 at the time. One morning while we were drinking some awful coffee substitute she told me about the dream she had had the night before.

It was about her best friend in elementary school. I knew the girl too – a short girl with the blond hair and always smiling. My sister dreamed that her friend was falling and was talking to her in a strange way.

The day after she had that dream, she found out that her friend, a beautiful girl named as Alma – was dead. A piece of shrapnel had found its way to her heart.

There is no way that she could possibly have had any advance knowledge of that terrible news. Even so, somehow she knew. Alma tried to tell her in her dream.

If I was a bit more, how do they say, religiously inclined or whatever, this would have turned me into a believer in God, firm as a rock. But it didn’t.

Johnny took the conversation in a completely new direction, discussing the issue of wasted time:

- It is so easy to get annoyed by the fact of how much time we're constantly wasting. We're doing it all the time – I ought to be doing this or doing that, instead of what I am doing now, which is nothing.

Al Gore was candidate for US president once. His opponent was, well, I don't think you don't need me to tell you. The reports about global warming and warnings about fundamental changes in the weather aren't just alarming any more – they are catastrophic.

During the Bush era crucial issues relating to this problem were consistently ignored. And all that has led us to where we find ourselves now, it’s not five to twelve any more, it is a quarter past twelve as far as climate change is concerned.

Eight years have been lost avoiding dealing with an issue that makes any other question second rank – as one British journalist has commented.

During the nineteen-nineties communism collapsed. Yugoslavia was a country in southeastern Europe with the prospect of a great future ahead of it, the Yugoslav version of communism was very adaptable, and the country was never part of the Soviet bloc. It was thought that Yugoslavia might be the first ex-communist country to join the European Union. The visionary and progressive prime minister Ante Markovic introduced significant reforms and improvements in the country’s monetary policy, things looked bright, a new age was on the horizon.

But meanwhile in Serbia Slobodan Milosevic was making his first moves towards achieving the goal that he had been a long time preparing – the goal of establishing hegemony over the whole of Yugoslavia. It was to end in a terrible, bloody war, instigated by himself, and instead of advancing into a new era full of hope, the age of Microsoft and Michael Jordan, everything went back to the middle ages of nationalism and religious hatred and savagery. Former Yugoslavia stepped forward into the abyss. Twenty years of a normal, prosperous life were lost. And who knows how many more still lie ahead.