National illusions and hallucinations

The red spot on the white paper becomes greenish, but maintains it's shape, when you move your eyes to the empty part.

Some say that the retina gets tired and it protects itself, by producing the illusion of the complementary color.

That is what happens at the eye level.

But similarly, an individual who is phonically isolated, in deep darkness, at a normal body temperature, after about fifteen minutes, starts having hallucinations, seeing flashes, hearing voices.

That happens in the brain - we are so accustomed with a certain pace of the stimuli bombardment that in their absence we generate them ourselves.

It is possible our nation has experienced a similar hallucination upon the death of king Michael the 1st.

In the beginning I thought we were dealing with some kind of huge manipulation, but now, even though the mass manipulation is beyond doubt, I am starting to suspect that the cause of the scale of the people's emotion and actions, was not just manipulation, but also a form of "complementary color".

First came the Government Decision to announce three days of national mourning (last year, queen Anne was given only one day of national mourning).

The law requires the TV and radio stations to "adapt their program appropriately" to the period of mourning, meaning that they have been aligned just like they used to back in the days when we only had one TV network and our sense of hearing was inundated by the noise of the funeral, present everywhere.

I wasn't surprised at the regrets expressed by young people.

On the screen we had the title "Romanians mourn their king".

Let's do some math: 70 years have elapsed between 1947 (the year of the abdication) and 2017. 70 years have elapsed. In order for Michael the 1st to be "my king", I should be about 90 year old.

We have less than ten thousand nonagenarians in Romania.

Maybe he is the king of academician Mihai Şora, who, at 101 years old, came back to the spotlight, with all due respect, by publishing a memorable philosophical text, but for taking to the street to protest the changes against the laws of the judicial system.

It's not bad, it's a good thing and that's it, others, even younger ones, don't exist.

But literally, Michael the 1st is Mihai Şora's king, not mine.

Figuratively, I could see how the title "Romanians mourn their king", because he was the last one who sat on the throne of Romania, but we are not all royalists, in fact, royalists are a minority.

These aren't just impressions of mine, they are considered to be realities.

Therefore, I attributed the length of the "goodbye line" to the influence of the mass-media and the feed-back of the herd spirit and I wasn't surprised by it, just like I wasn't surprised by the fact that another mentally insane person tried to shove somebody in front of the subway, after the previous incident was publicized by the TV networks, and in fact I actually poked fun at what to me was "the mortuary hysteria", and I said that in the Editorial meeting that the people who were lining up to go to the Royal Palace would then go and shove each other in front of the subway.

The barb kind of died on my lips, when the funerary convoy was welcomed by spontaneous crowds, who were throwing flowers on the hearse and later, on the locomotive.

The ratings of PRO TV boomed over twelve hours of broadcasting the funeral, from 9:00, to 21:00.

I now suspect it was only manipulation up to a point.

I suspect that a certain point, the folks manifested the fatigue of their collective retinas and generated a green spot.

Surrounded by the generalized lying of the so-called "political class", boiling in abjection and natural humiliation, crawling around in a life devoid of dignity, the country's citizens have clung to this "something else" which is royalty and have lived in a hallucination, that decency, kindness, the rallying around class of character.

In this version, the funeral was a kind of celebration of self-rediscovery, a test which shows that hope still exists.