Metamorphosis

I just spent 2 weeks in Poland, most of it in my parents' apartment in Warsaw. I was quite positively shocked at the amount and type of change Poland underwent in this relatively short period since the fall of the communism. It was now a country I felt much more at home in than the one I left behind more than a decade ago. What I saw wasn't very different from things I saw in Germany or the US, but the realization that Poland was now more and more resembling these prosperous democracies was staggering. I went to supermarkets that were cleaner, better stacked, and offered better quality of products than those I shop in in Ann Arbor. I saw bookstores filled with beautifully published books and magazines, including many titles banned under the socialist regime. I ran through shopping malls with brand name stores, whose wares no regular wage earner like myself could possibly afford. Taxi drivers asked me which route to my destination I'd prefer. Store clerks said "Thank you!" and "Have a good day!" (in Polish, of course). It was like a dream.

Certainly, some parts of this dream were more like a nightmare. Apparently, stealing has become a national pastime, so store owners hired armies of security guards, who wandered around looking like Secret Service agents or mafia hit men - dark suits, sunglasses, thin cables flowing down from one ear - and seemed to be watching your every move. I felt like an inmate in a minimum security prison. The drab, soulless apartment buildings of the bygone era were still there, now more dilapidated than ever. Graffiti, almost unknown before, now covered many a wall. Shady looking teenagers with buzz cuts openly drank beer on bus stops. Big percentage of the population had been surviving on $300, $400 a month, including educated people in professions such as hospital nurse, school teacher, research scientist... (This kind of money would have been a small fortune in the socialist Poland, but now, with prices dictated by world markets and not government subsidies, these wages are almost as meager as they would be in the US).

Things are definitely improving, though. My only real fear is that of eventual "latinization" of Poland, that is her becoming more like the countries of Latin America than Western Europe, with the social strata built of a thin layer of very reach oligarchy, another thin layer of middle class, and a very thick layer of the poor and dispossessed. There are luxury apartments being built in Warsaw, costing upwards of $200,000 (significantly more than our free standing house in relatively affluent, expensive Ann Arbor...), while the central train station fills with homeless every night.